It feels very much like breaking apart, except that if you stay with it, you realize what is breaking is an old, familiar and defining pain.
With regard to the content, I don’t think it is possible to overstate the social scars of 70 years of Communism, the habits that came into being, the tortures and traumas and horrors which happened and could not be talked about. The can be no doubt the main villain was a Communist, and very likely, based on the script, that he was either KGB, or involved in war atrocities.
I will add that some years after watching it, the Russian movie Burnt by the Sun still affects me when I think about it. Most movies come and go with me. Some scenes of bad movies stay with me. And some entire movies, their Gestalt, stay with me. That one was one of them. If you choose to watch it, nothing happens, seemingly, for a very long time. Then it grabs you by the balls, if I might borrow a metaphor from the movie I just watched.
There is so much horror in history. I don’t know why so many Americans are so fucking stupid as to want to destroy everything good and unique we have built here, all in favor of horrific ideas which have been tried thousands of times over the centuries.
All it would take is a few years of the media and academics telling the truth to sort everything out, but these fucking assholes won’t do it. They are all like the priest in this movie Leviathan. They speak of truth, but it is a meaningless word. They speak of justice, but it means nothing. They speak of goodness, but they carry evil everywhere.
I don’t see any incompatibility with me being kinder in my daily life, and remaining firmly committed to this war of ideas. As I have said often, emotional growth, for me, will not mean changing any of my ideas–I have built them carefully, and tested them often–but rather my level and type of engagement with people with whom I disagree.
“How to win friends and influence people” is in important respects a guide to the work of dealing with people, to getting along with them, and to helping convert them into allies in your happiness by becoming an ally in their happiness. We’re all connected, potentially, but it takes work to realize it in actuality, even when dealing with family and people with whom you share an instinctive and natural affinity.
The Trump economy has finally caught up with me personally The past couple weeks have been an extended series of logistical problems, requiring me to formulate plans and lists to deal with a host of situations relatively foreign to me. And it’s all very detailed: a 10/32 screw will work in some places, but in others it’s a 12/24 with square mounting nuts. Sometimes both have to be black. One person needs green wire, and another white velcro. Most of these items are special order, so I have to figure out what I might need a week ahead of time.
I’ve been dealing with all this by worrying continually. The worry has allowed me to spot some problems before they became problems. In other cases, I’ve run into problems I didn’t realize were possible, and had to react accordingly (more work is usually the correct answer).
And it hit me this morning that planning is really focused worry. If you do the focused worry correctly, once, then the rest of the worry–the sort of thing that drags you down–diminishes greatly.
And it hit me as well how stupid it is not to be well organized, not to be able to place your hands on the correct tool or gadget or whatever immediately. This adds stress to the whole process, unnecessarily.
And in reflecting on my own patterns, and where they come from, I realize that my home was always a chaotic mess in every possible respect. Physically, certainly, but both parents had a long standing habit of making plans then immediately abandoning them. We had vacations where we would change the plan 5-10 times. It was nerve wracking. I hated it.
But to a vastly lesser degree, I’ve replicated the problem. My own planning has been quite poor. I’m a master at just getting by, which is really no way for a man my age to live. And in truth, planning is hard in general for people with trauma, because the future is equal to the present, and we’re just trying to get through the present. A lot of drunks are poorly organized, not because they are drunks: they are drunks because they are poorly organized. The drinking and the unreliability are connected. They stem from the same source, which is the true “disease” if we are going to use that term. If I had been in the military, at least the habit of planning would have likely been drilled into me. I always wanted to be in the military, but it didn’t work out. Bad eyes (a problem back then) and scoliosis.
But I am realizing that a spiritual life, one which is peaceful and connected and happy, consists in large measure in dealing with anxiety, and dealing with anxiety, in turn, means having your shit together. It does not necessarily mean simplifying your life, but at least in removing the absolutely unnecessary frustrations of bad planning, disorganization, and always feeling like the world is acting on you, because you made no intelligent preparations.
Maturity, in other words, is spiritual. It is the starting point. Perhaps not even that, but at the minimum a sine qua non. This point should be obvious, but looking around me, I really don’t think it is.
I remember listening to a relaxation series many years ago by a guy named Emmett Miller. It was very good. That was when I realized deep relaxation was something I could not do, although I had no idea why. It seemed simple enough: do the exercises, and prosper. I’ve tried to teach myself Autogenic and Progressive relaxation multiple times. The shit starts coming up, and poof I’m out of it, and feeling a little worse for the wear.
But it is silly to think that ANY well integrated personality will not be physically organized. Take an Einstein, for instance, whose desk was notoriously cluttered. What I infer from that is that he was driven, emotionally, to do what he did. This is not intrinsically all bad–he was a genius after all–but it is also not intrinsically good. Many scientists, I feel, are like this: driven by unexplored emotional conflicts into the domain of pure and beautiful abstraction.
So too are most Leftists. One would think Central Planning–planning by the, in theory, cognitive 1%, the brilliant, the most capable–would work. But it never allows enough information, because it is dealing with people who are mutable, motivated in many ways, and prone to reacting in unpredictable ways to all aspects of the system, over and above the price problem so well described by Friedrich Hayek (in, among other places, “The Fatal Conceit”).
And this is the interesting question about the whole thing: given a record uninterrupted by ANY success anywhere on a large scale, why do people keep proposing these ideas?
Simple: because this is their “science”, their refuge from the real world, which is to say, in the end, their own unexpressed and painful emotional conflicts and scars. They NEED it to work
So the whole thing is expressed, not a practical, result oriented enterprise, but as an AESTHETIC project designed to appeal to the sensibilities of those who style themselves the cognitive 1%, the geniuses. I’ve said this before many times, but not, I don’t think, quite this way.
Happy people like doing effective work. They like seeing their ideas come to fruition, and when they fail, it bothers them. They ask questions. They wonder where things went wrong. Then they roll up their sleeves, and try again more intelligently.
This is the thing: the Socialist want to “try again”, but not differently. They want exactly the same things, free stuff for everyone, to be paid for by “the rich”. It’s a monochromatic mania, pushed by demented, morally and psychologically ill people, for whom words mean as little as results. Their actions mean what they say they do, just as their words do. Justice can be tortured into any form desired, in the underlevels of their intellectual Lubyanka.
As I say, I have this evil in me too. I am not innocent. But where I like to think I shine is that I remain, I think, capable of learning, capable of change, and certainly dedicated in my own mind to personal evolution.
So I bought a couple tool boxes at Home Depot, and am becoming a fanatic about lists.
But if you need love, one, and that love must start with you, two, then the only way forward is be kind. Personally, I strongly dislike the ethos of kindness as a morality, at least when disconnected with wisdom. I have written about this.
But purely selfishly, purely in order to get what I want from other people, I need to drop my knife, and become someone I can love, because I am loving.
I know who I am. I know the thoughts that float through my brain. I see the anger, and resentment, and the wickedness and silliness and vanity and all the rest.
Purely in order to get what I want–open loving connection–I need to become a better person. I cannot trust anyone else until I trust myself, until I am the sort of person I am looking for.
Nobody will save you. You may find people whose own emotional dysfunctions cause them to try, but in all, or nearly all, cases that will be in the pursuit of their own avoidance of their own issues. So you are being “saved” by someone who also needs saving. That is the blind leading the blind.
So I am going to try and turn over a new leaf. I am going to be nice to that guy at Home Depot who always tries too hard to be friendly, and who I normally scowl at. I am going to walk more slowly, and fuck the people who think they need me to be running everywhere all the time. I am the sort of person worth treating with respect and consideration. I will offer it to myself, and to the extent I can, without losing large clients, demand it from others.
It is scary and overwhelming that it all starts with us. I don’t think most people feel equal to the task of running their own lives, of living consciously and purposively, and I definitely don’t think people who do not have an internalized role model and example feel any confidence at all. We sometimes pretend we are confident, but how can we be? It’s all a leap of faith.
Mustard seeds, my friend, mustard seeds.
And I’m wondering why my first impulse is stabbing people. As I consider, it is because I was under sustained emotional attack from both of my parents all my youth, and extending unto now. That is a deep template in me. I don’t trust people.
But this is the trick, isn’t it? The art of life is the art of living with people, of finding happiness with them, in their company. And we Americans are not terribly good at that. We don’t do “familia” very well.
I don’t want to be the one to solve these problems. I want all my problems to be solved miraculously. I want love to suddenly emerge and care for me, to salve my wounds, to care for me, listen to me, heal me.
I see, though, that I am the only one who can do that. It all starts with loving yourself, and you cannot love yourself if you treat the world with violence. It comes with kindness, with knowing you are a trustworthy, decent person.
And as far as my kids, I gave to them, but did my best not to take, and I think it worked.
And I look at myself. It is a fucking miracle I am still alive. I keep saying this. I keep wondering at it. I should be dead, by all rational measures and metrics.
But I have something in me which does not quit, which is fucking hard, which will spit in your face and then punch a knife in your carotid, which does not give a fuck, which is born to survive, to live, and to reproduce.
And my kids have this too. I didn’t try to give it to them: they simply inherited it.
I have always been honest with everyone, including my kids. I admit my weaknesses. I admit my failures. I own my frequent stupidity. I have a high fucking IQ but I am still sometimes a goddamned moron. It pisses me off. I try to make it up when I rain accidentally on someones parade, which I have done in the last week.
Everything I do: I try to pour my soul in it. I go in with everything. I bet everything I have. This is the only honest approach. I fail sometimes, and it hurts.
But to the point: both my kids hear me. They understand how I am. And I think they feel this path too, however weakly and incompetently I have walked it. I went all in, and will continue to do so as long as I live. This is the game. This is life. It ends at some point, but what happens in the middle is up to me.
From 2015 Census data, the median income for a household was (in 2015 dollars) $34,299. Per capita income in past 12 months (in 2015 dollars): $18,456 with persons in poverty at 30.3%. Per the 2016 Census data, the median income for a household was $35,302. Per capita income was cited at $18,896.
Queens has a poverty rate of 13.7%.
These are the districts which are her JOB. Where is her concern for her own people, for the people who elected her? They may or may not give a shit about people who sneak over our border in the middle of the night, but I think all the poor in her district would like better jobs.
Do you think she cares? Of course not. When she starts visiting the housing projects and desolate neighborhoods in her own district, and those next to it, like the South Bronx, then she might have the sliver of credibility which is presently missing entirely.
She is a grandstanding narcissist, with horrible ideas, no sense of personal responsibility, no sense of loyalty, and in the end nothing which could even remotely be called a sense of decency. She decided she deserved a raise six months into a piss poor performance. She will be “one of them” momentarily, assuming she is not already. Congress converts the weak, and she is clearly weak.
It’s all a bad play, performed for greedy self interested imbeciles, and for those who find in bad politics the moral foundation they lack in their own actual lives.
Put another way, whenever you are looking at a thought or a feeling, you are looking at a wall. You create the door yourself.
I think there is some truth in this comment. What lies behind that truth, though? Ah, maybe I will ponder that tonight.
What I also felt was how easy it is to LOSE all of that. It comes along, like a tide, it lasts for a moment or two–longer if you are one of perhaps 3 dozen people in a nation of 350 million people–then it fades away. You become someone who USED to be famous. The feeling fades, and you seek to get it back.
What I felt was how precarious all that is. No wonder so many stars are so messed up. You have to be a little insane to have a drive to be famous in the first place, and then getting close, or achieving it, and losing it, must be horrible. Hollywood is filled with people who had a moment in the sun, then it was gone. They wait every day for their agents to call, but they never do, or it is terrible stuff. And the women: they get older. Those parts go to about 10 women in this country.
And I was listening to the Nirvana song an hour ago, that ends with them droning over and over “all alone is all we are”, and I got to thinking–and I think I’ve commented on this before–that being a “rock star” is obviously overrated too, for most of them. Maybe Gene Simmons has it figured out. But most of them are a bit insane, and so many of them die young. I went through Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell and the singer for Linkin Park in 3 seconds. Then Jim Morrison, Jimmie Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Keith Moon, Nick Drake. Even Elvis belongs on this list.
Actually here is a long list, for just the 1970’s, nearly all of them premature. Even the heart attacks can in most cases be ascribed to unhealthy habits deriving from unhappiness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deaths_in_rock_and_roll_(1970s)
What can you hold on to? What lasts? What is reliable? These are very Buddhist questions. Rock and roll is not the answer: it is just a complex addiction, in itself.