Fear Of Speaking One's Mind

I'm not sure why this is such a big fear.

I think generally the answer is that we, as people, get outraged quite easily, and so speaking unedited can result in outraging others.

Outrage seems to be there to trigger group  cohesion, i.e. if we're outraged at the same thing, we must be on a team and can trust one another more.

It still sucks that it is so hard to speak one's mind in a way that isn't intended to be malicious but can often be perceived as exactly that: with intent and hurtful.

Which is not to say that sometimes we are unintentionally hurtful and it is still our fault since we should have known better.  But I'm not talking about those times so much, as just the general ease of conversation possible between two people and the way we guard and select our thoughts to appease (at least I do this often) the other person more so than if we were speaking to someone else...

"The Road"

I'm not so clinical as to hold skepticism over the always pervading metaphor of life as a journey (as opposed to happenstance, random events that we tag together as narrative).  AND, because journeys queue romantic ideals, it is often tempting to see life as some sort of linear progression.  Which is also to say that if you've been somewhere, you won't be back there, exactly, again.  You don't really go back.  Or if you do, it is clear, anyway.  Ah, exit 34, where I binge drink for five weeks straight and become estranged from my parents!  Yep, I know that one.

Consider a misty confused world, when you don't know where you are.  You're not sure what the exit reads.  You don't know how far you've come.  You're not lost, but you're certainly not found, and you have no idea where you want to go.

I find it useful to think of progression, though I hold a few caveats.

Caveat number 1:  It is really exceedingly easy to traipse upon ground you've traipsed on before and not recognize it.  Which is to say that we have to stay constantly curious and aware, and that we don't really learn everything we need to know, necessarily, the first or second time we experience an event.   It is hard to stay patient, by the way.

Caveat number 2: We don't know where we're going.  We won't ever get there.  But the journey and the idea that we're going somewhere is still really important.

Caveat number 3: Since there's no beginning and no end, comparisons to other people's positions are largely irrelevant.

Caveat number 4: There may or may not be an invisible hand.  Sometimes, though, it is nice to feel like something is "meant" to be.  This is a feeling we should indulge in rarely, as it is often delusion.

Caveat number 5: Knowing something conceptually and knowing it experientially allows such a wide definition of "knowing" that I am not convinced these are the same objects at all.

Caveat number 6:  To some degree we create our own reality.  It is only to a degree, though, and forgetting this will lead back to delusion

Hope number 1: Other people can share in beautiful events.

Hope number 2:  We can be inspired even and especially after horrible loss.

Hope number 3: The possibility exists that everything will get exponentially better at any random juncture in time, and that all suffering will be validated, but repeating this phrase too often leads to judgmentalism and hypocrisy, as well as laziness.  Hope number 3 is for clarity within bliss: for the ideal of fractured ideals that hold images of reality in their seams.

What Is Life About?

God help me, because I don't know anymore.

Is it mating?  Is that it?  Raising issue/kids?  Is it about status, finding a way in this cold world and holding your head high against the tides that be?

A Beethoven string quartet?  Beauty?  Some aesthetic ideal?  Aren't aesthetic ideals just sort of reflections of what's so beautiful about life, though, in some more essential way?

Getting into good relations with others?  Well, what does that mean?  What relationship is crucial and honest, not a pot-luck or amalgam of hesitations and false-starts?  Which relationships work?

Having respectful kids?  Parents?  Elders?

Is it not going mad by the time you've reached middle age?  Recognized mortality?  Fended off youthful idealism?  Found enlightenment?  Where?  How?  What does it look like?  Is there any right answer?  I'm stunned for something correct.  Please provide it.

Have faith?  Is that the answer?  Have faith that there is purpose?

In the end, is religion effective because it is effectively all we can do??

Thank God I Made It To Where I Am Today

What a pathetic and shallow post title!

What little punk of a kid would risk the shallowness of a greeting card.

Where else do you think you could ever be, besides where you are, anyway!

Well...  I'll tell you where.  I could cease to exist.  I could have vanished.  I'm not living an out loud life these days, trying to imprint my existence on other people or the world as much as when I felt I could do such a thing, and I'm certainly unaligned in political battles.  I see turf wars with a wary eye.

What I've just accomplished, at this moment, is a very decent roast of coffee in my home oven, and some opera, prepared laundry, written a few words in a journal that I'll type out henceforth, and worked a decent day at my decent job.

I don't need more, necessarily.  There are other facts that I'm leaving out.  I've been losing weight, fast.  Since I stopped eating all sugar, it has been like I'm in a new body.  Huge amounts of energy that were not available in the past.  Consistency of sleep.  Exercise.  A loving partner.

But I'm well aware that I could have ruined it.  Seriously ruined it.  And "it" to a lot of people is perhaps something to be looked down upon.  I however, am growing to cherish it a lot more than I ever thought I could.

Because our decisions do matter.

And I was very close to  making flip decisions that would impact me for the rest of my life many, many times.

And I'm glad that I didn't make certain decisions, and that other decisions didn't hurt me as much as they could have hurt me.

And I'm glad I have the courage to stick to something for once.  I've NEVER been able to stick to anything.  Just stick to it, I tell myself, and I tell you, readers, and stick and stick and stick.

Queue webbed feet.

Not Cursed. Blessed.

I got that feeling today of being extremely lucky.  All of the things that represent the biggest challenges to me, that I can get really worked up concerning different possible scenarios.

They flipped.

I can't explain it so much as intuit it.   Instead of representing challenges to be overcome, they mutated into blessings for me to enjoy in the fullest, and I got a rush of good ole connection with those around me.

Instead of feeling threatened and making complicated excuses for my own emotional responses, I felt thankful.

Instead of trying to protect my ego by denigrating other people, I felt fortunate that I could be exposed to the challenge they represent.

If I couldn't respond to what someone was saying it meant not that they were stupid, but that I had to refine my beliefs.

I know this sounds quaint.  Trust me, when reading it I know.  I also know this is fundamentally true in a big way, a way that allows me to stand on my own shoulders and embrace that which I am submerged in, instead of trying to run away from it, or be scared.

Overwhelmingness and incomprehensibility are to be cherished sometimes.  Now happens to be one of those times.

Drunk Driving

I realized that after two and a half years of sobriety and blogging about sobriety I had not spoken whatsoever of any episodes of drunk driving.

The reason?  I'm so bloomin' ashamed of my own behavior, I can't even anonymously report any incident.

Which is a testament to the tremendous loads of guilt I've let sit on my chest for years, how badly they made me feel, and how much I want to avoid--simply obliterate more likely--the memories.

But the truth, naturally, is that I, like you, if you are an raging binge drinker/alcoholic like me, and live mostly anywhere in America where bars are only accessible via auto, have driven drunk, quite a few times.

My general rule was not to do so, mind you.

It's never like I set out to drive drunk.  Who does?

Drunk driving is a behavior like domestic violence.  I don't think there's a way to justify it, and I don't think those who perpetuate it begin their days saying that they plan on committing an act of intrinsic evil.

But the formula for occurrence is easy.  You know a few friends.  Friends who like to drink.  You live in a Midwestern state, for instance   Your friends live outside of the city.  Not too far, but far enough that taking your car is a normal way to arrive to the event.

You arrive at event.  Set strict limit for alcohol consumption.  You overindulge.  You wait out the overindulgence.  But then again, how long does it take to get 1 drink out of your system?  1 hour, 2? How many hours can one sit there, letting one's liver clean out the booze?

And what if the over indulgence was 4 beers worth.

And what's the legal limit anyway?  Isn't it at least 4 beers?  Isn't it at least .08?  Sometimes .10?  Isn't that 5?

Isn't it justifiable that having 7 and waiting 2 hours is okay?

Well, these are hard calculations to make.  How much food have you had?  How much weight?

And that's only the situation where I ended up driving drunk incidentally, whereas I was not drunk enough to black out or be totally out of my skin, so I drove "Carefully," whatever the fuck that means.

There are other situations.  Far worse situations.  Situations where holding the wheel itself is a chore.  Where judging the distance to a stop light is a journey in itself.  Where the eyeball doesn't want to constrict and all lights turn into big blurs.  Where sliding happens.  Where worse happens.

Thanks God nothing worse ever happened to me.  I can count those bad times on one hand.  I'm relatively young.  But I was lucky.  And I know people who were not so lucky.  And their entire lives changed, not to mention people's lives they hit.  Not to mention all sorts of other vile shit that I can't even get into here without feeling an excessive need to vomit.

Make No Mistake

People will screw you over if they can.

And that's unfortunate, but true, in a lot of cases.

Home construction.  Autos.  Lots of services where you don't have a specialty and you don't know the true price of the service.  They change their terms.  They add in little extras.  They nudge.  They plead.  It is ridiculous and true.  The quote, then requote.

As if we need more people besides ourselves screwing with ourselves.

A Graphic on Binge Drinking

Do You Want to Struggle?

What's the honest answer?

The honest answer is that we want the recognition, esteem, and perhaps insights that struggles bring, the experiential knowledge of interactivity, and not necessarily the cost, the moments of abject loneliness, of tepid criminality, pangs of guilt, shame, worse.

Struggling is so often a predicate for worthwhile behaviors that we forget that there could be degrees to struggle, to strife, and that those degrees of intensity don't correspond one for one to the outcomes that we desire from struggle.

Yes, this is abstract, and yes applicable to many situations.

But the honest answer is that we want an easy route to nirvana, that we want enlightenment without starvation, that we are all hypocrites  and that this is expected okay behavior.  We don't need to denigrate hypocrites.  It won't do any good.  It is in our nature.  I dislike unfair play, competitions that protect folks who shouldn't be protected, people who don't make it on their merit.  The truth, though, is that merit is a fairly fungible thing, outside of outcomes that are finitely computational, and lots of people get jobs, for instance, because of the way they make their potential boss feel, or worse.  There's a lot of unfair shit that can drive any sane person right off the cliff of insanity.

Struggle, though, isn't about getting things for free.  So why go nuts when thinking about how others get things with no struggle?

Because the truth is that we don't want to struggle, not right now.  We want to watch TV, or maybe go for a walk, or maybe just sort of read and lounge.  But the truth is also that we will suffer for our stagnation, that it is unhealthy to sit all day, mentally and physically, and that we will be happier if we don't follow our nature to be as lazy as we possibly can.    That's what self-improvement is all about, anyway, not just finding the easy road because it is possible, but weighing a host of heavier handles, and trying to pick in a dynamic fluid system that is opaque at best, trying to maintain the complexity in models where we need simplicity for the sake of moving anywhere.

At times it is easier just to throw up our hands, to sigh, to scream, to fuck everyone and everything, and just . . .

What, exactly?

Trying, struggling, learning to fail, those are the things we do the best.  To stop is to die.  To stop is to become stale.  To fail smartly is the hardest thing.  Not to align one's ego with all murmurs across the hall, not to hold fiercely onto ideology or outrage for the sake of feeling good about oneself.  To exist and be small, to step back and re-evaluate without pressure, to sink into pressure again, to flop and to make nervous gestures, to implicate, to run away, to simply accept the colossal mountain of shit we've emerged from, relatively battered, maybe, still alive, still attempting to run a solid respectable life without giving in

To stray purposefully away from everything that is cheap and easy, not for the sake of principle so much as because cheap and easy things are so very expensive. To learn from the sins of our youth, and not proselytize sin.

Things are, for the first time, not so bad.

For the first time in my life, I honestly feel like things are not so bad.  I know that sounds slack, and halfway dishonest. For the first time in my life, I don't think of perfection as the sole goal to living.  I understand that process is the point, the end of the journey, and it is a profound cliche: the point of living is to err, to correct, to find solutions that aren't immediately evident, to deal with unexpected layers of events you had no idea could even occur before they did.  To understand the mounting tension in a Bach string quartet, before it slowly disintegrates back to a few simple lines.

Proper Nutrition Beats Alcohol -

If you're drinking your meals, it will be virtually impossible to stop drinking.

Because you'll get fucking hungry as all hell.

For goodness sake eat some solid protein instead of drinking.  Not refined carbs.  Not sugar.  Not alcohol.

It is easier to quit when you're not starving.

Pissing People Off -

This is bound to happen some day.  We simply cannot always placate everyone else.  

For many years, I tried.  It is in my nature to try.  Often to a fault.  Lots of other people simply always look out for "number 1" without any equivocation.

But it also turns out that some interactions really are zero sum game, and in those situations, you basically offer a different person comfort at your expense.  This is okay sometimes, surely, and expected.  There are a number of situations where it is expected that we relinquish seats, slow down, or otherwise help. 

There are other situations, though, when our desires are strictly opposed by others, and the only way to get what we desire, or need, is to not put others first.  It isn't always pleasant.  For me it isn't pleasant.

The point is not to do so gratuitously. Stick up for yourself without inflicting damage or causing unnecessary future harm.

Be careful, though (see, even now, I am putting myself second): outrage is an easy trigger for us all.  It binds us into and against others, and offers tunnel vision.