Dish Boy & Politics.

Last time Dish Boy brought up politics with me I got him so pissed off he didn’t ask me a single question for over an hour.

So naturally, as he does it again, the temptation to deliver words that would serve as the verbal equivalent of throwing a gallon of gasoline on this conversation and striking a match as I calmly walk away from the explosion like the cool guys in the movies is bloody overwhelming.

“Did you hear they assassinated the president?” Dish Boy asks. “They caught the guy the day after, though.”

Just as it was the previous occasion, he speaks about it now with so much conviction it irritates me, but I remind myself that his memory is like an Etch-a-Sketch suffering from a perpetual Grand Mal seizure, so the fact that he retained even a garbled rendition of the truth should probably be applauded.

Deep breaths, Tim. Deep breaths.

Calmly, I explain to Dish Boy that it was technically an attempted assassination, as the guy only managed to Van Gough our former (and, it increasingly seems certain, future) but-not-present president, and they shot the Bullet-Riddler on the Roof dead that very day.

You know, shortly after that Secret Service group-hug with the spray-tan raisin in the middle known as The Donald who, once acquiring his lost loafers, defiantly fisted the heavens before a roaring audience, leading to what will undoubtedly be an iconic photograph.

“Oh,” he says. “I didn’t know that.”

Please don’t bring up the suspicious aspects of the incident, I think at him, as I’d hate to agree with you and you’re the last guy I’d want to leap down a rabbit hole with.

Thankfully, he does not.

No, then he tells me about Trump’s pick for vice president, that he’s a “good guy,” and I want to ask him why, but these aren’t really his thoughts, I realize. He’s adopted what little he could pick up from what his parents have said, I’m guessing, so that conversation would just be awkward for him. And, yeah, me.

I just say that Vance’s values and ideals don’t align with my own and hope that’s enough, but Dish Boy insists, “no, no, his values are good,” as if this was just a simple, honest misunderstanding of mine.

As if these weren’t subjective judgements but objective actualities.

As if I’d clearly just not gotten the memo about which values were the holy, singular, right ones. As if I must have simply missed that meeting where I was informed of what values I’m supposed to adopt.

Didn’t you attend the brain-washing seminar?

I hold my tongue between my not-so-pearly whites and just take out the trash, knowing that by the time he sees me next, in roughly ten minutes, he’ll likely default to his usual, stupid questions.

He does.

And relatively-speaking, it’s fucking euphoric.

Different Flavors of Dystopia (Pages From My Drunk Diary, Part II).

6/12/24

Here’s the thing: over the years, even within my lifetime, the positions held by the Democratic and Republican parties have changed.

Despite this, people still seem to swallow the positions of whatever party they identify with as a whole — to the point that if you learn of a person’s position on one of the issues you can with a disturbingly high degree of certainty predict what their positions will be on all the rest.

Now, ask yourself: how likely would it be that the majority of the US population would carefully, thoughtfully consider all the political issues and independently arrive at all the same conclusions presently embraced by either Team Red or Team Blue?

I’m no statistician, but I reckon it’s highly fucking unlikely.

So the cause of this black/white, red/blue grouping is clearly that people are either unwilling or have become utterly incapable of truly thinking for themselves, but instead prefer to embrace groupthink or herd mentality.

Perhaps it has been this way all along and the political polarization that seems to be becoming increasingly intensified today is just due to the change in news media.

I mean, we now largely get our news via the net, after all, which due to internet algorithms suggest content based on our viewing of previous content, thereby creating an informational echo-chamber that only serves to reinforce and elaborate upon pre-established “data” we’ve consumed and simultaneously blind us all to all else.

While this certainly seems to play a major role, perhaps there are other factors. I am, after all, a dumb fuck.

Even so, what is clear as fucking day is the core issue: people are unable or unwilling to think for themselves.

They identify with and worship groups; they identify with and worship “leaders,” investing faith (in the sense of uncritical certitude) in the beliefs of those groups out of a need for belonging, investing faith (in the sense of uncritical trust) in the proclamations of their leaders.

All of which certainly stems from our nature as a social species.

These inclinations are rooted in our genes, after all. They push and pull at us with the awesome weight and attraction of our shared, evolutionary history, like ghosts haunting us, guiding us, possessing us.

Even though this legion of the dead only applies to contexts and circumstances that we’ve left behind, they’re with us still.

Even though they apply to how we lived for nearly 99% percent of our history, they do not fit within the context and circumstances of today – for our biology is subject to evolution by means of natural selection deep beneath, on a long time-scale, and our culture is subject to revolutions by means of collective election on the surface, on an increasingly shorter one, striving to sublimate those naturally-born, evolutionary instincts so that they can assert themselves into the context of our current environmental pressures.

Old ghosts, newly enfleshed in a modern context, with the ghosts effectively static as the current context undergoes exponential and utterly unpredictable development.

We’re children in an ever-changing, exponentially-advancing playground operating on the same ol’, ancient rules.

Survival depends on one of two avenues: returning to the way things were, the way our context was for 99% of our history, or changing ourselves so that we more effectively adapt to the presently ever-changing context.

The realization that neither option seems any more preferable than they seem probable to me is haunting, daunting, taunting, as the only alternative – which in my pessimism, my cynicism, seems infinitely more likely – is our extinction by our own hand.

This is not the future I want to see, not by a long shot, but it is the inevitable result I can’t help but see given the conditions and our present trajectory.

So if we are to survive, I fear, either of the two other alternatives must occur, either by our own hand or that of others, and in any case, the scenarios I’m presently capable of imagining only offer different flavors of dystopia.

There is a distinct difference between believing what you want to believe and believing what the available evidence seems to suggest, and that apparent fact, while I’ve long been aware of it, has never been as potent as it is in this particular and unfortunately broad circumstance.

Never in my fucking life have I hoped so much that I might be so bloody wrong.

Sequel, Not a Reload (Page From My Drunk Diary, Part I).

6/5/24

The biggest threat to democracy, to our country, to the world?

It isn’t Trump – that neurologically-glitching, narcissistic convict. It’s not Biden – that neurologically-glitching step away from a political rendition of Weekend at Bernies.

Or even Harris, as Biden would almost inevitably bite the dust and be buried beneath six feet of dirt at best two years into his second term, leaving that unconvincing semblance of a human at the helm.

No. Severe as these threats may seem, a still greater horror looms. I speak of the political polarization in the ol’ US of fuckin’ A. The greatest threat of all.

Since before Trump was elected, I felt it. The faultline growing into a gap evolving into a yawning fucking chasm where those at either side couldn’t hear each other despite screaming at each other across the gulf, much less hope to understand one another and begin mending this ever-gaping wound in our culture.

This wound that has fucking become our culture.

Even now, this void persists in widening.
And this central chasm? Make no mistake: it is only that.

Given the spotlight by the media, by social media, algorithms that only serve to feed the dismal, core dissociation, it’s clearly just the core, the poisoned heart of this issue, and by no means the whole.

From that hub, the strands of further fracturing can be found, after all. Blind feminists, alpha male fucks, and weak little incels. Extreme trans activists – who I am yet to be convinced represent the core and authentic trans community – and the predictable pushback from the far, extreme, not nearly right, right. MAGA Trump cultists and what I once would have called the Woke cultists, in other words.

I’ve become a bit wary of the word Woke, however. I mean, it’s clearly been subject to such a cultural gang-bang now it’s difficult to discern how one might even hope to define it, so I can’t help but feel dirty (in the bad way) even using the term.

Originally deriving from a song that hoped to remind the black community to remain ever-vigilant with respect to the prejudice waged against them, it was thereafter appropriated by the far left and expanded in definition, used to refer to all minorities and their alleged similar circumstances, and was then ultimately commandeered by the right to refer to whatever it was they perceived as despicable when it came to the left.

This word, Woke: it has been fucked so much, from so many angles, that it has become a whore of a word, dripping, oozing with the differing meaning pounded into it by so many, from so many countless angles, that in the end it means nothing.

Yet still, still it burns bright, shining like a neon-blazing sign, like a torch newly forged from the fires of our collective ignorance, slicing through our collective skin from countless dimensions, severing, dividing, fracturing, further serving to crack the ground we jointly stand on all the fucking more.

I so want to be done with your bullshit. My bullshit. Our bullshit.

I want to look away, walk away, leave this all behind me for the betterment of my mental health, and damned be the rest of you. The rest of us.

Yet I’m a part of you. You’re a part of me. Like it or not.

A wise woman once told me that there is a web that stretches across the universe, interconnecting all souls, and while I can’t be sure exactly what she meant by that, I’ve contemplated it often since I was a child. However pathetic and miniscule we might think our individual words or actions might be, it’s like plucking a strand on that cosmic spider-web: the entire web vibrates as a consequence.

Like throwing a stone into a pond, the impact sends ripples that travel out from the point of impact to all edges of the body of water — and so, I guess, inject the notion of the “butterfly effect” here and all that fucking rot…

At any rate, that divine, unearthly teacher of mine believed in me, for whatever reason – believed in us, or so my unsupported memories and current working hypothesis goes – and so despite my cynicism, pessimism, and loathing for not only myself, but the species to which I belong as a whole, I hold onto all that she, my self-described Teacher, told me, who she described as an Artist.

There is a dark cloud suffocating our world, she told me during this same conversation.

And I don’t want to contribute to that dark cloud. I really don’t. I want to believe in the web of souls. I want to believe that each of us can pluck the strands that intersect the luminous beings she claimed we all are and consequently send our positive vibrations across the entirety of the webwork, to cure the disease that plagues us all and plow our way towards collective health.

As pathetic as it may be – and I know, I fucking know it is – I’m doing by best. So I beg of you, at least join me and try. And Nimi, if by some chance you’re listening, reading, scanning my inebriated thoughts, know that I – or less egotistically, we – could use some fucking help. Not dictation, mind you. Like Johnny Five, I only require more input. Some merciful illumination.

I only need to remember.

I’ve never been one for uncritical allegiance or blind faith, but something tells me you know this story, understand my position. Something tells me, my blessed bitch, that you’ve been down this treacherous road before us before, and maybe I have, too. Let me know, at the very least, the details regarding how, where, and why we went wrong.

I’d much fucking prefer a decent sequel to the same ol’ shitty reload.

On How the Reasonably Empathic Can Rule Like Psychopaths.

When I first started working here in this fast food shit show of a job, we had six-month reviews and raises based on merit. We had picnics and parties at some fucking park every year where all crew members from every store in the franchise would be invited. Where you’d get free food and enter your name in a raffle to get prizes. Then, over the years, that shit started going away. Slowly but surely, until it was entirely flushed down the drain.

Though I only saw him on the rarest of occasions, I began to think of the franchise owner, who I’ll call Bob, as a psychopathic tyrant who cared not the least bit for those beneath him – those workers in each of his stores who made this shit happen, that made all of this possible for him.

I remembered reading at some point in the late aughts or early teens that according to studies, just 1% of the general population had psychopathic traits compared to 15% percent of the prison population. These were power-hungry, control-thirsty assholes devoid of empathy and compassion who were often able to utilize their charm to disguise their true nature to achieve dominance, profit from their manipulation, and elude capture when they committed crimes. Compared with the 15% of psychopaths that comprised the prison population, however, it was found that up to 12% of CEOs had such psychopathic traits as well. They were just the more intelligent psychopaths who learned how to play society’s game and used it to climb up the corporate ladder.

This, I thought, must surely be the nature of Bob.

Then maybe a decade ago they tore down our store and initiated a rebuild. During that process, there was a day when another guy and I were supposed to help out Bob. He drove us around, got us a meal, and we all talked. It blew my mind that he turned out to be such a warm, reasonably empathic, even funny guy.

He wasn’t a psychopath. Not. At fucking. All.

I say this with reasonable confidence because I’m convinced that I’d know a true psychopath if I were around one for long enough, as I feel I was with Bob. I say this with reasonable confidence because I feel that I’ve met roughly half a dozen people in my life who I’m convinced were full-blown psychopaths, and two stand out, at least with respect to the road I wish to go down and explore here.

One was an Uncle of mine, the other a girl I worked with. Concerning these two, while every red flag and alarm bell went off in me regarding their nature, I found it utterly amazing how calm I felt when in their presence. With most people, the “energy” or “vibes” on the surface are often in a state of chaotic flux, with the core rather complex but consistent, but with these two, who I presumed to be psychopaths, there was a dark, angry, ambitious core, but the surface “vibes” were eerily still, disturbingly quiet. Given my hypersensitivity to the emotions of others, however, as disturbing as I knew it was given my intellectual understanding of what it signified, the surface experience itself was calming.

Bob? He was a perfectly normal guy in terms of emotion. Not a psychopath in the least. This confused me greatly. After all, how could someone like that run a business the way he did? I kind of felt the same way recently when watching some clips of the Lex Fridman Podcast where Lex was talking with Jeff Bezos. To me, Bezos has been the real-life embodiment of Lex Luther. While the portions of the interview I watched didn’t sway me from that perception entirely, he didn’t exactly resonate with the stereotypical supervillain I’d made him out to be.

Assuming Bezos is not a mustache-twirling, villainous psychopath, the same question I had after meeting Bob is also true in his case: how can he run his business as if he is?

As far as I can tell, at least in Bob’s case, it’s for no less than two reasons: isolation and delegation.

The higher you are on the corporate ladder, the less likely you are to develop an understanding and empathy with the workers at the bottom. You’re isolated, insulated from those social ties because you don’t work with those people daily, week after week, sometimes year in and year out.

The higher up the corporate ladder you are, the more you can delegate, and the more you can have those just below you do your dirty work for you.

If you need to lay people off or fire them, it doesn’t hurt you, at least as much, because you haven’t developed ties with them, and on top of that, you don’t have to be the one doing the laying off or firing — you have the store managers do that for you. You don’t have to slowly get to know people, empathize with them, and then look those same people in the eye and tell them they no longer work here.

A lot of people might look at the up to 12% of CEOs who show signs of psychopathy and wonder how it could be so high, but honestly, I’ve looked at that percentage for years upon years and wondered how on earth it could be so low, given how those in power tend to treat those below them. Given the perspective granted to me by Bob, however, I feel I’ve come to understand the remaining 88%, and that’s the understanding I’ve attempted to articulate here: they’re not psychopathic. They might even be exceptionally empathic, for all I know. It’s just that the system allows for a perfectly empathic person to rule over a hierarchy of underlings in a psychopathic manner because it allows them to be cut off, and isolated by the masses over which they rule through isolation, through delegation.

Given that those capable of exhibiting psychopathic tendencies – whether or not they are themselves truly psychopathic – are at the top in our society, this means that they constitute the equivalent of apex predators in the natural environment.

In others words, we have built a social system in which psychopathic tendencies serve as the optimal means of survival. We’ve constructed a culture in which psychopaths, or those who can operate in a psychopathic manner while not being psychopaths, constitute the most successful mutation, bear the greatest survival advantage.

Humans have managed to construct an inhumane society.

We’ve self-domesticated ourselves into believing that becoming narcissistic assholes with a tunnel-vision aiming for the greatest conceivable manifestation of dominance is the way to our rendition of the promised land.

In conclusion, this seeming revelation makes me sick and I don’t want to be a part of it. Furthermore, I don’t think I serve as a suitable member of a social species and I’d like a lawyer who can provide suitable divorce papers for me to sign.

That is all.

Bigger’s Trigger.

12/24/07

When we were in the midst of reading Native Son, we came upon the issue again. It became evident that in the Prof’s eyes, as in the eyes of the character of Max in the novel, Bigger is not responsible for who he is, and certainly not for the two murders he committed. In Max’s courtroom argument against the death sentence, he says that it’s not right for us to kill Bigger. We should separate him from society for life so that he is unable to do it again, yes, but we should not kill him. It would be unethical for us to murder this murderer, they say, ”for being the way we made him.”

We should understand him so as not to demonize him. We should ”hate the sin but love the sinner,” and remember that ”to understand all is to forgive all.” But we don’t want to understand Bigger. If we did, we would have to face the fact that we’re responsible for what he’s done.

Following?

See, we set up the conditions that drove Bigger (and what he symbolizes) to do this, and as such his actions, at least in his heart, are comparable to the actions of self-defense of a soldier of war. To understand Bigger would force us to admit our guilt, and we want to blot out our guilt. So we blot out Bigger. We enjoy having a villain, having someone to hate, and so Bigger as a rapist and a murderer serves a function for the people. Labeling him as evil serves a function for the people. We are now licensed in our conscience to hate him, to kill him. We must kill the killer (through the government’s monopoly on justified murder) to show that killing is wrong and will not be tolerated. We blame him for making us have to kill him, all the while trying to blot out that we drove him to his own murders.

This is not about justice, Max and the Prof say. The reality is that we get off on killing him.

Through his death sentence, we get to express our unconscious hatred and violence. The hatred and violence which is normally held in check by society but which is now temporarily suspended with respect to how we feel and deal with Bigger because he expressed the hatred and violence that we agreed (upon social contract) to suppress save for the legally-sanctioned windows. Like the legally-sanctioned window through which we vent upon him, if only vicariously.

Basically, they’re saying: we drove him to kill so we would have an excuse to kill him.

This is their fucking cultural conspiracy theory.

And I may agree with the suggestion for life sentence in such a case, but I do not agree with the logic behind it. Or the philosophical ramifications of extending that logic to its inevitable conclusions.

The Prof speaks about the concept of moral luck, where some people are born into situations that offer opportunity for ”good” choices, while others are not. Bigger’s environment hindered his emotional intelligence, they say. There was negligence from childhood on; there was no real physical contact or true love. Such trauma affects the brain. If we see Bigger as a victimizer, so be it, they say, as it seems perfectly justified. But we should also see him as a victim.

We can’t blame him for what he did, says the Prof, any more than we can blame a dog for not being able to do algebra.

True, all true, I agree. Save for the dog and algebra thing. Save for the implication that the two mentioned facts here — that he is a victim, that he is a victimizer — have the strong relation to each other that Max and the Prof suggest. They do not. In service of the ultimate purpose of their argument, they cannot.

If him being a victim excuses his victimizing, then our victimizing him would be excusable as well, as he victimized us. The logic goes both ways. It must. And so round and round and round the blaming finger goes, swirling towards event horizon.

Histories, memories. In the Prof’s eyes, this no doubt constitutes the core of our identities. But while he sees character, and I would be inclined to assume on that basis all else, as rigidly deterministic due to nature and nurture, I perceive the matter quite differently. Circumstance obviously has an effect on our choices, but all circumstance does is create paths of lesser and greater resistance. It’s probabilistic, not deterministic.

Of course, that raises the question as to what the deciding factor is. What makes the probability-wave crash upon the shores of actuality one way, as opposed to another? Is it all randomness?

I say not. I say it’s free will. I say this is the core of identity. I say this is the determining factor.

We typically overestimate the amount of free will we put forth in our lives, so we often take one of the paths of lesser resistance — perhaps the path of least resistance — and so, given enough data regarding perhaps nothing more than the ”closest” and most relevant variables, we are pretty damned predictable. This, however, is not equivalent to fate. This does not mean we are predetermined. This does not make free will some flimsy idea from a former era we are best to look back on with scorn, humor, or embarrassment.

This does not free us from personal responsibility. This is not the cosmic fucking pardon.

If that were true and you logically extended this argument of fate (even if only through the medium of nature and nurture) you would have to admit that no one was responsible. That’s this logic’s ultimate conclusion. You would have to admit the Big Bang itself was responsible, or the singularity preceding it was responsible. That or just infinite fucking regress.

People have overcome their conditions. Reprogrammed themselves. And despite being opposed by forces trying to hold and beat them down. Despite influences from every which way trying to drive them to the contrary.

We are more than the products of our pasts. Our genetics. Our environment.

So many say of people who drop bombs and shoot others during war, ”They’re just following orders. They’re just doing their job.”

True. And yet.

We don’t create murderers. Killers. We don’t create anyone, we can only influence. We only create the gun, make the bullets, load the weapon and put it within arm’s reach. And that indicates somethings fucked up about our society. No argument there. But don’t make the mistake of glossing over the fact that the murderer made a choice he didn’t have to make.

After all, he chose to pick up the damned gun and pull the fucking trigger.

If we’re all just products of fate, of course, than he’s not responsible for his actions, but neither are we — and so we’re not responsible for him. It’s personal responsibility or no responsibility. There is no gray area.

Inside the Mind Behind the Trigger Finger.

Back when I was in school, we had fire drills and tornado drills so that in the event of such an emergency we would have a fairly good idea as to what we should do.

Tornadoes never hit, though. Fires never happened. Kind of disappointing, if you ask me.

The most exciting, potentially catastrophic scenario I ever experienced while in school was an earthquake we had in the late 80s. It was during second grade, I think, and we were all sitting on the floor — that’s how I remember it, anyway — as the teacher spoke to us. Suddenly I heard something strange, and I turned my head towards the hallway just in time to see an Exit sign fall off the ceiling and hit the floor. I jumped. It was frightening for a moment, then mysterious, then kind of funny.

Shortly thereafter, chaos ensued.

The ground moved like an angry ocean, like violent fluid. Vision was akin to the shakey cameras in those horrible “found footage” movies. Everyone was fumbling around like drunken monkeys. When it was all over, we all laughed, as if to relieve the tension.

Nowadays, kids like my niece and nephew have to go through active shooter drills. Not a potential catastrophe brought about by nature or a faceless arsonist or electrical fire but potentially by a gun-towing classmate who desires to pump as many people full of lead that they can manage before they’re either shot dead by a police officer or gather the courage to turn the barrel of their own gun on themselves and spray-paint the floor and walls with their blood and brains.

As all old fucks tend to say: well, kids, I guess I just lived in a different world.

Columbine happened two years after I graduated high school. My friend and I decided to walk up to the old high school one day to visit our art teacher when we noticed a cop following us into the building, then into the school office. We noted it and expressed our confusion to one another.

The reason, as we later discovered? My non-chalont friend was wearing a trench coat.

Once we got in the office, we found another kid there, sitting where kids always sat when they were sent to the office, awaiting a meeting with the principal. This kid, we soon learned, was sent to the principals office because he was wearing a trench coat much like my friend — and he refused to take it off.

My friend and this kid were suspected members of the Trench Coat Mafia.

Me? I was just some backwards-hat, flannel-wearing, coffee-shop-going, nincompoop bystander with poor hygeine caught in the mix, yet as innocent as the other two. I was confused and irritated nonetheless. Hell, I thought it was stupid when our Vietnam Vet shop teacher would send kids to the office for wearing ballcaps or sneaking into the music room to smoke cigarettes during high school, and that wasn’t even distantly related to events involving mass homicide.

That’s when I got my first suspicion that shit had changed.

Since then, that shit has hit the fan and spread far and wide. School shootings happen with such a frequency in the good ol’ US of A that its hardly newsworthy anymore. It’s too common now. Too boring. Only during a recent, global pandemic in which all but “essential workers” — a group which I, a fast food worker, was strangely a part — were isolated did the flying bullets amidst the hallways and classrooms of schools here in ‘Murica experience a commercial break.

Worry not, though: we’re back on our game. It happened again, this time in Texas, and the ‘Murican masses remained faithful to their well-rehearsed script.

Does it piss me off?

Does it piss me off how every time yet another school shooting gets widespread media attention that all that Republicans seem to scream about is fucking gun rights?

Yes.

But does it also piss me off how every time another school shooting gets widespread media attention that all that the Democrats seem to scream about is gun regulation?

Also yes.

What pisses me off the most, however, is that since as far back as Columbine, neither side ever seems interested in talking about much of anything beyond the issue of guns.

On the blue end of the spectrum, people often speak of guns as if they’re haunted objects out of a Stephen King novel that telepathically summon the weak to purchase them and subsequently possess them into committing acts of violence. As a natural consequence, Team Blue adopts the position that stricter gun regulation is The Answer.

And don’t get me wrong: common sense gun laws should be a no-brainer, and I personally know sensible Republicans who agree. This is something that would certainly help, of course, but Team Blue is so hyperfocused on it that all thought stops there. In their mind, this is The Answer. If only access to guns were a far more complex labyrinth, they assert, such atrocities could be effectively circumvented.

Personally, I think they’re full of shit.

On the red end of the spectrum, however, things get similarly ludicrous. They don’t react to the gun violence so much as they react to the reaction of Team Blue to the gun violence. In other words, theyre hyperfocused on immediately going on the defensive:

“Don’t take our rights away. We have a right to own guns.”

To their credit, I do think it’s a right. I’ve never trusted my government less than I do now, nor the insanity of the herd, and that’s saying a lot. I’ve been waiting for the shit to hit the fan on a global scale since high school. As comedic genius Bill Burr put it in one of his bits — and yes, I’m paraphrasing here — you can have a library of books containing all the clever ways of living off the grid available, you can grow your own food, have a bomb shelter, and have your bug-out bag filled to the brim and ready to go, but unless you’ve also got sufficient firepower, all you’re really doing is collecting supplies for the most powerful, morally-flexible motherfucker on the block.

Yes, guns terrify me, but I support our right to have them.

Having said all that, I’ve never heard a sensible person on the left ever propose that all guns should be taken away, anyway.

So is Team Red crazier? Team Blue? Pick and choose and rate them by matter of degree, but when all is said and done, when you get down to it — assuming you’re interested in doing so at all — by and large, it becomes abundantly clear that both uber-troops of color-coded, groupthinking apes are bloody fucking idiots. Red, blue: the colors are bloody irrelevant in that respect.

Rather than travel down those typical avenues of well-established, reactionary thought every time another kid pumps lead into their classmates, why not try to stop yourself, clear it all away, and ask the actual question?

What is it that makes these individuals want to purchase these weapons and then go shoot up a school?

Guns are just tools, after all, and inherently amoral, so its utterly stupid to blame them. So really, take the relentless spotlight away from them for a moment and ask yourself: what is it that drives people to use these tools? What is it that inspires the fingers that pull these triggers? What influences them to have such a disturbing lack of value in human life?

That’s the real question, and this fact should be obvious, but no one spends much time at all looking at it, much less really examining it, and so they forever remain light-years away from exploring potential solutions.

Sure, some members of Team Red talk on how “mental illness” is really the core issue, but sorry, that’s an incredibly vague term, and they never elaborate, at least not in such a way that ever circles back to the real issue at hand.

I mean, look around you. Nowadays, nearly everyone qualifies as mentally ill. BPD. ADHD. Depression. Anxiety. And on and on.

No guesswork is needed, either. Few are shy about sharing the flavors they’ve been diagnosed with. Sometimes it seems like a badge of goddamn honor for people. Some kids almost treat it like a rite of passage. I don’t consider myself a member of either camp, but truth be known, I’ve suffered from anxiety and depression for years. I was always comfortable offering up that I was anxious, as I hoped it might explain to people the bulk of my behavior, but the depression aspect always left me feeling ashamed. I’m not sure why. In either case, despite my “mental illnesses,” not once have I considered shooting up a school. Not in high school, not in college, not fucking now.

So tell me: what specific type of mental illness inspires people to do such a thing? Firearm Spiritual Possession Disorder? Is it really that Stephen King thing?

To my ears, in my mind, to call someone “mentally ill” is just a nicer way of calling someone crazy, and crazy is just a dismissive term, a thought-stopper with respect to understanding the motivations of another. So vague as to be meaningless.

Alone, it means nothing. Fucking nothing.

So what’s truly inside the mind residing behind the trigger finger? In an attempt to get inside their heads, I’ve imagined a few scenarios. I’ve cooked up in my own twisted mind why they might do what they do. Not a Stephen King thing, exactly, but perhaps even more disturbing.

1. A Pathway to Power.

Guns level the playing field. More than that: it gives you the advantage.

Imagine some physically weak and emotionally fragile kid with a home life littered with emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. Imagine he goes to school and is either shunned or beaten up by his peers.

He can’t take it anymore.

He could never hope to defeat them by sheer physical strength alone, so he begins generating revenge fantasies where he manages to get the upper hand. The easiest way to get that upper hand? Have that hand hold a gun.

It doesn’t matter how physically powerful the kid’s abusers are, how physically weak he may be: no amount of muscle is a match for a rain of bullets.

The kid knows it will likely be the last thing he ever does, but as long as he knows they know he’s not such a pussy after all, as long as he turns the tables on them and can see them in the powerless position they always put him in — and by his own hand, no less — he feels he can die with some semblance of dignity.

And if guns are outlawed? This circumstance, it doesn’t go away. He’ll buy one illegally. And if he can’t get a gun, he’ll get a knife to shank somebody, just like they do in prisons, where they can’t have guns, either. If stabbing someone is too intimate in his eyes, or he can’t get the kill-count he’s aiming for, he’ll go for something more impersonal. Maybe he’ll get a copy of the Anarchists Cookbook and build a bomb.

Outlaw the book? He’ll get it online.

2. Route to Celebrity Status.

Imagine a kid who’s lost in the crowd, unable to contribute anything meaningful to the whole, which couldn’t seem less interested in him, anyway. How can he mean something? How on earth could a nobody as utterly insignificant as him ever hope to leave a mark on the collective psyche?

He watches the news. He watches the movies.

After much contemplation, he comes to the conclusion that violence is the easiest way to get people’s attention and immortalize himself in their memory. Violence is the easiest route to celebrity status. Not only would those closest to the violence undoubtedly remember it to their dying day, the media would solidify him in the minds of the greater masses by posting his photo on the news, on the videos you click on YouTube, and talking about him endlessly, and perhaps even provide his manifesto, if he considered it a worthy self-imposed homework assignment before delivering his storm of bullets.

Its just like in the movie Seven, where John Doe, played by a canceled, junk-grabbing actor, says:

“You can’t just tap people on the shoulder anymore. You have to hit them with a sledgehammer. Then you’ll notice you have their strict attention.”

***

Now, we aren’t just products of our environment. We aren’t just empty vessels to be filled by Hollywood, the media, our friends, or how we grew up.

I believe in what I call free will, individual liberty, personal choice. But I also believe in what I call fate, which is the coupling of nature and nurture. Who we are and who we become is found in the tug-o-war between free will and fate.

In the gap betwixt them are a spectrum of choices ranging from the path of least resistance to the path of greatest resistance, and that spectrum is different for each one of us. What is the easiest thing for you to do may be the hardest thing for me, and vice versa.

We need diversity to evolve, to survive as a whole on every concievable level, and this spectrum of choice is it’s inevitable consequence.

We all have different points of departure that, so far as we can tell, we had no choice in. That’s the fate part. Our parents. Their psychology. Their economic status. The society we were born into. Even our own psychology and predisposition may have been entirely random for all we know.

All of this, so far as we can tell, was merely a roll of the dice. But we still have freedom of choice.

A kid born in the slums does not have the same spectrum of choices as a kid born into a rich family whose father gave him “a small loan of a million dollars,” so take that pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps bullshit and aggressively force-feed it to your posterior blow-hole and take a double-shot of empathy and compassion.

My point is that while fate — one’s environment and circumstances — don’t necessarily make an individual, they undoubtedly serve as vital ingredients in the process of development, so we should stop an ask ourselves what it is about the conditions of our society that make this choice for kids to shoot up a school such an easy and alluring one.

We are a divided country, now more than ever. There is the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor. The increasing distance between The People and our not-much-of-a-choice of out-of-touch, corrupt, so-called representatives. The ever-intensifying political polarization, of course. The gap between men and women continually reinforced by modern Feminism. The systemic racism.

The cracks in our collective consciousness are stretching further, the chasms between us are widening. Our culture is literally tearing apart at the seams.

Once United, we would now be more appropriately referred to as the Divided States of America, and that’s not only a metaphor: survey says growing numbers on both left and right think we should divide the country into red-run and blue-run states.

We hate each other.

Nobody is listening to anybody else, and everyone’s voice is lost in the crowd unless they sing along in the hate-fueled echo-chambers. Sing out of tune, they label you a member of The Other.

Do so much as communicate with The Other, hear them out, strive to understand them, put some empathy and compassion into practice, and you’re guilty by means of association, and so they label you as a member of The Other.

There’s no tolerance for the gray area, no room for the spectrum between the extremes, no ability to embrace nuance. You’re only allowed to see in black or white, red or blue. It’s all binary — a rather ironic position for the authoritarian aspects of the left in particular, if you think about it.

But everybody listens to the guy with the gun. Everybody reads the manifesto of the guy who built, placed, and set off the bomb.

You can’t just tap people on the shoulder anymore, and maybe that cuts close to the core of this problem.

Celebrities, Authorities, & Ex-Girlfriends (3/22/23 Dream).

I’m not asleep for three hours when I awaken in my dark bedroom at 7 AM, filled to the brim with anxiety, the dream I just pushed myself out of still vivid in my mind.

I’m sharing a large hotel room with a group of people, all of us hanging out on our respective beds. In the midst of various conversations and activities, my attention begins to narrow on this one guy, who looks incredibly familiar, though I can’t quite place him at first. After some time passes, it suddenly occurs to me that he looks remarkably like the actor who played Lucus, the private investigator from the television show House, MD. I asked him, though through indirect yet strong suggestion, if this was who he was, but he responded with dodging and denial.

After he had left the room for some reason, I told one of the girls about it, and both her and the others in the room seemed to show great interest. At this point in the dream, however, there was a sudden and irrational shift in the narrative: this guy didn’t just look like the actor who played Lucus, but actually was Lucus. Furthermore, I was somehow a stand-in for House, as I had been in a relationship with Cuddy — a revelation that came to the surprise of everyone, as she was evidently our boss — after which she began dating him.

Shortly thereafter, another girl I used to date strolled in through the door — a slender, petite, sexy woman with short hair who looked like some mixture of Kelli Renee Williams, who played psychologist Dr. Gillian Foster on the show, Lie to Me, and Christa Beatrice Miller, who played Jordan Sullivan on Scrubs. She kept eye contact, slowly approaching me, and immediately started being flirty. Her knee was rubbing me between the legs, her hands were all over me, and she was speaking in that soft, seductive way.

She takes me into hallway, clearly suggesting she wanted to get it on, and I ask her if there’s anything I should know. She says that she doesn’t like condoms, and I say that that’s a problem. I don’t want kids. She says, regarding raw-dogging, “but it feels so good.”

We go through another hotel room door down the hall into what I presume will be her room, but other people there, sitting at rows of tables, busy with paperwork, handing off folders to agents that I know to be assignments. This is the FBI. They hand me a folder, but I refuse. I don’t work for them. Turning to her, I tell her I was under the impression that we were going to have sex. She then tells me she intended on getting an assignment alone so we could go find a place somewhere.

They aggressive insist I take a folder, specifically some large black woman who is sitting down, handing it to me without even looking up from her work, but I still refuse. As i go to exit the room, my ex says my name and then says, “take a folder or I’ll kick your ass.” I say no and casually grab a weapon off the table — like a fancy police stick — on my way out the door.

I go down the hall and enter what I think k is my hotel room door, but as soon as I’m inside, weapon in hand, all the fa es of the group turn to me, and none are familiar.

“Sorry, wrong group,” I say and promptly exit. I don’t want to go towards the exit of the hotel, as there is a police station there, so I go in the opposite direction.

I’m frantic because I’m lost again, and then I wake up with a jolt.

The three central symbols in this dream — hotels, celebrities, and authorities — are all symbols associated with transformation.

Hotels aren’t a place you live, of course, but constitute a temporary residence, and so may suggest a transformational change in one’s life and their uncertainty about the coming change they’re reaching for. Given the group I was with seemed to be my present workmates and the FBI tried to forcibly recruit me, this is likely in reference to my search for a new job as of late.

Sex with celebrities (or the roles they’ve played in television or movies, if referenced) may represent ideal qualities that you desire to develop and integrate — or once had and have since lost and wish to re-integrate. Given both Cuddy and the slender girl were exes in my dream, they perhaps represent lost aspects of myself I want back — or that I’m “flirting” with the idea, in the case of the slender woman.

In either case, they represent, again, a desire for transformation, but perhaps once again a hesitancy.

In this case, it may reference a desire for sex and intimacy with a girl and the confidence that develops during those frustratingly rare periods in my life. In a dream I had the night before, some guy was trying to get me to do at least three sexual things to Melania Trump, and I refused, likely on account to the disasterous douche nozzle she’s married to. I don’t know what the other two acts were, but after repeated insistence I agreed to lick her pussy. I did, too: a simple lick upwards between her lower lips. It tasted salty, but nice, and the taste felt so real.

Given this repeats the celebrity and sex theme, I’ve got to wonder.

Authorities in dreams are said to represent parts of ourselves that organize and control the aforementioned integrations and transformations, and given that we supposedly often dream of them when trying to make big changes in our lives.

As for the end of the dream, new rooms represent new or old and unconscious extensions of ourselves. At the end of the dream, as has been a relentless theme lately, I felt lost. That one probably needs the least explanation of all.

Our Infested, Pale Blue Dot (Day of Eight Billion).

Happy holiday.

Officially, November 15th, 2022 is now known as the Day of Eight Billion, where we have achieved a new milestone as a species: 8 billion humans currently reside on our cosmic island earth.

On our infested, pale blue dot.

The first time the world population was on my radar, I remember it being 5 billion. That milestone, I’ve discovered, was reached in 1987. The Day of Six Billion? It came to pass on October 12, 1999. The Day of Seven Billion? Halloween of 2011.

Our exponential growth is predicted to hit the ceiling at 10.4 billion during the 2080s, when apparently we’ll both stop living longer despite the high technology we’re projected to have at that point and the trend of raw-dogging will, like, die off or something.

Sounds legit.

The truth is that if there were less people, our growing problems as a species would all but vanish — climate change comes to mind — but we keep making more and more of us, because the process is goddamned glorious (from what I recall) and babies are cute.

And, yes, they are cute. Most of them, anyway.

The UN considers this recent milestone to be a call for celebration. Me? I consider it a call for contraception, vasectomies, tied tubes, or at the very least developing an advanced pull-out game.

And it’s one more reason — if body autonomy isn’t reason enough for you, that is — to push for abortion rights.

Just saying.

So in honor of today, hug a homosexual you know. Or even a failed, childless heterosexual, like yours truly. It may not be our motivation, but in this small case, at the very least, we’ve managed to not be part of the problem, if only circumstantially.

And I expect to get shit for saying all this, but be gentle. I mean, I’ve finally found a reason to be happy regarding my poor track record when it comes to getting laid.

Don’t ruin this for me.