i am

For most of my life, I looked for social connection online. Now as it increasingly becomes the norm, I've adopted a more luddite view that doing so is a fundamentally bad idea. I'm talking relationships of all kinds, friends, acquaintances, romantic partners. Not that there's anything wrong with meeting and engaging with people online, but it's not a substitute for engaging with people physically, materially, chemically.

Even blogging, I'd imagine an audience, imagine that I'm talking to someone. It's an attempt at socializing that all too understandably leaves me feeling less than sated in my basic impulse for human contact. I'd fixate on whether people would be interested or understand my rantings on the nature of the universe and why the meaning life is actually 43, when really, that's a whole lot less important than I'd like to think. 

I used to believe that what goes on in our heads best represents who we are. That sharing long letters explaining everything best encapsulated getting to know each other, but what does this mean when we never really know ourselves? The self being an ever-changing nexus point amidst a vast tangle of ever-changing circumstances, we go down endless rabbit holes trying to sort it all out. 

I want to believe it's who I am, because it feels like taking control of the narrative. I can spend all day explaining myself and giving my thoughts on everything, but I'm not doing anything. I'm not being anything. We are how we behave in the moment, at the whims of so many external factors. I'm tired of being someone forever explaining myself. I don't have any answers. I don't know what the fuck's going on. 

There is a whole lot to who we are that we can't even pretend to control. We might say how others perceive us is not who we are, but who we are is a matter of perspective. Consequences arise from the interaction of all these circumstances. To define ourselves apart from everything else is to create an abstraction, an irrelevant concept in our heads. 

Reality is material. All of these thoughts and feelings are material. The consequences of chemical reactions with environment. Ever more I'm learning this, training with people. Depending on each other, helping each other grow, struggling alongside each other and against each other. It matters that it's all so physical, stimulating chemical reactions without regard for abstractions of who we are. 

What is connection but another chemical reaction? The imperative that I find others like me was pathological. A need to find people that don't make me feel so small. I need to find ways to engage with people who actually exist. I need to get past fears of doing exactly that. Training does that for me to at least some extent. If only I weren't getting sick and injured all the time. What are we when we are nothing to anyone else?

I've realized that who I am doesn't matter. Not in the sense that I thought it did. Not as a concept to be explained, but we matter as the product of our interactions with the world around us. We are what we do with our lives. Try to do better, try to have a positive impact, endlessly entangled in countless reasons we never quite get there.

rejection sensitivity dysmorphia

I've long understood ADHD to be part of my problem, another label to add to the laundry list of mental health problems that have been dragging me down my whole life, but I'm realizing it's more than that. Like so many labels, it feels problematic and inadequate to me. Don't lots of people have attention span issues? 

When I tried going back to school a few years ago, I knew it was an issue, and attempted medicating, but that didn't really help. I didn't want to admit how little it helped, for fear that was evidence it wasn't really the problem at all. Really, I think the problem is that medication is overrated in many cases. It just doesn't do all that much, in my experience. 

I enjoyed taking it though. It didn't do much for learning calculus, but helped me enjoy video games more and the like. It helped me give up caffeine, which I'm now thoroughly addicted to again.

I haven't been on the Adderall since I dropped out. I don't think it's a good idea, at least not in my case. Some more recent reading I've done on ADHD and "rejection sensitivity dysphoria" has lead me to suspect the disorder might be much more pervasive than I'd previously understood, and in turn, taking a stimulant simply isn't going to address most of the problem.

Surely, ADHD doesn't explain my abject failure at life, right? My inability to do much of anything, socially, vocationally, or even recreationally? It might be a big part of it, compounded by GHD.. 

For one thing, it actually does explain why I refer to myself as a failure. Turns out that's a typical conclusion people with ADHD come to about themselves. I have so much difficulty engaging with anything that I've failed at almost everything I've tried and learned to stop trying, so that I fail more than ever, and this is all too common.

It's also fitting that upon finally crawling out of my shell after all these years, I've heavily gravitated towards something as viscerally engaging as combat sports. RSD explains why I was so devastated being told I wasn't in good enough shape to be competitive. I loathe putting myself in any position to be judged. Only doing it when I expect positive results, when I typically expect the worst. What a catastrophe when my neurotic fears are confirmed.

I've been working harder than ever, but still haven't recovered from that whole debacle. I'm still looking forward to beating the shit out of the coach who did that to me, but for some reason he doesn't like sparring with me. Hah. I might be trying too hard to prove myself, despite getting sick or injured again every few weeks. 

Maybe I am too old. My body's been going wrong at every turn lately. Maybe it's the loneliness, undermining my immune system, defenses, and common sense. I feel like I've aged twenty years in the last two. Maybe its pandemic related, or just my 48 year string of bad luck.

ADHD in its more serious clinical forms has a lot of overlap with autism. So much so that it could be considered 'on the spectrum,' and overlooked for sounding like an inadequate explanation. It can cause lots of failure, social isolation and alienation, especially in combination with having an endocrine disorder that sows lifelong feelings of inferiority like GHD. I looked 14 until I was 35. I avoided my peers entirely because of how small and immature I felt compared to all of them, as I fell only further behind on all the grown up things I wasn't doing. This severely compounded the problem. I spent my whole life hiding.

Now I'm out in the world again, and it fucking hurts. I'm not like other people - not because I'm special, but because I'm malfunctioning. Disabled. Inadequate. Old. My social anxiety doesn't come out of nowhere. It's an all too reasonable consequence of this reality. 

I'm making progress, but it never feels like enough. No matter how I try, I can never catch a break. Nothing ever works out, but I keep getting older. Everything just keeps getting worse. I'm afraid life has already passed me by, but what can I do but keep trying.

the big electron

It doesn't punish. 

It doesn't reward. 

It doesn't judge at all.

It just is. 

and so are we, 

for a little while.

~George Carlin

It's been a hell of a decade.

Ten years ago, I was living in Chicago with Jenny and my cat, listening to Melodysheep auto-tunes on YouTube. A fundamentally questionable artform, but I thought his work was pretty good, considering. Ten years ago, he released this one, The Big Electron. Ten years ago, I started writing this blog.

empire of lies

It's funny how I commented on this months ago, before reading up on China. I wasn't sure I'd be quite as supportive of them as I am of Russia. Now it feels completely natural. I like Russia, but of course I like China even more. Especially upon reading up on the major atrocities they're accused of, and realizing the west is full of shit, as usual.

This doesn't mean I approve of everything they do. That is a crazy standard people attempt to throw at me. Right, show me the country that never does anything I disapprove of. It sure isn't the US. This is the most evil country in the modern era, and they have the gall to go around lecturing others on democracy. The American people have no voice or power. What they call "democracy" is just cover for the capitalist cancer destroying the planet.

Taiwan is of similarly critical strategic interest to China, as Ukraine is to Russia. During WW2, they both suffered massive losses via those regions. For a rabid hostile adversary like the US to set up puppet regimes and military infrastructure in Taiwan or Ukraine is insanely aggressive. Taiwan should be properly unified with China anyhow though.

The US is forcing a military response, and even worse, they must damn well know it. Our leaders may want hundreds of thousands of people to die, just to weaken Russia and China, while enriching the military-industrial complex, as we send them tens of billions of dollars, amidst soaring inflation. Spend that money on the American people? Hah, they just laugh at us as we're dying. 

That's how evil this country is. Democrats and Republicans alike are no better than Nazis. Slava Ukraini indeed. I don't care that blue Nazis want to kinda sorta almost protect abortion rights.

Guess I'm back to taking sides again. It comes naturally, and I'm feeling too burned out to give a damn. It's just that now I'm siding against this entire country. Summer hasn't been going as well as I'd hoped. At least geopolitics gives the feeling of hating everything some legitimacy.

multi faceted

I decided against my own free will not to go to the gym today. I make this sort of decision often and with great frustration. I was really looking forward to going, WHAT THE FUCK. I feel like a kid whose parent tells them they can't go out to play. A deranged and unstable parent whose judgment I don't trust, nor whose authority do I respect.

Watching my peers, I admire the ones who make it to almost every class and open workout. I try to emulate them, but I am not as fundamentally motivated as they are. I am motivated differently, often prioritizing protecting myself, both mentally and physically. I can get myself moving and with increasingly impressive levels of energy, but there are many days where it just doesn't happen. I can't find the energy, I can't find the courage, I just sit and listen as these two sides curse at each other until it's too late to go anywhere.

I often try to focus on the progress I continue making in spite of it. It's frustrating, but overall, I'm moving in the right direction and that gives me hope. Highly debatable though, is the prospect that the protective side is actually right. Occasionally even these young people cavalierly discuss how training destroys their bodies. They regularly come to the gym with aches and pains that I'd call an excuse to stay home. 

Once the endorphins are flowing, you hardly feel it. I've got two decades on many of them, so it makes sense for me to be more careful, but I even wonder if they're overdoing it, too. The longer we're alive, the more natural it becomes to think long term. Having good working knees ten years from now seems more important than winning a competition next week, to me.

Assessing risk is difficult, and we're heavily biased by what we want to do and what we feel like doing. I assess risk obsessively though, and worry that it's me overdoing it, making excuses, being lazy. Rationalizing. Look at the evidence though. I'm not destroying my body at all. It keeps getting stronger. I feel more resilient than ever. It sure seems as though I'm doing something right.

Yet, It doesn't quite add up. I don't have any joint problems right now. Some aches and pains, but nothing I should have to worry about aggravating. Emotionally, a dismal wreck, but going is supposed to help with that, not make it worse. 

This other part of me though, I don't know how much there is to it. Maybe it's more than just a dissenting view, but even has access to information I don't have. Unconscious, nuanced, complicated. The unconscious can juggle information in ways the conscious mind does not. While consciousness tries to focus, the unconscious strives to manage everything all at once.

There's an argument to be made there for trusting our instincts, which is to say, trusting our unconscious impulses, even when they run counter to what we really want to be doing. At the same time though, the future is looking so dark and narrowing lately. I don't know that I have much time left. Feelings of impending doom can be symptomatic of depression, but depression also has numerous ways of causing impending doom. I hope it's just depression, as I overreact to every day wasted, each opportunity missed or fumbled. Progress inches along, as the darkness closes in. 

There are times when risks and poor odds make sense, the more threatened we feel by circumstances continuing fundamentally unchanged. Change happens always. We can try to utilize change for the better, or we can leave it to entropy, atrophy, and decay.

I'm modulating the effort as well as I can, but I feel like a blind person trying to figure out if my handwriting is legible. I can't see a thing. I feel like a failure.

socialist china

"America has 170 million people, we have several times that number, plentiful resources, and a similar climate; catching up is possible. Should we catch up? Of course we should, or else what are you 600 million people doing? … In another 50 or 60 years, we should be ahead of them." -Mao 

In 1950, average life expectancy in China was only 36 years. This blew me away, I didn't realize it was that bad. That's dark ages, even prehistoric. In the US, it was almost 70, even then. By 1975, life expectancy in China shot up to 63, while inching up to 72 in the US. I understand better now why older people think China's such a miserable place, but they're a little behind the times. Most of the world has come a long way in the same time frame, but none so far as China.

Twenty five years later, the US was still looking ok. Life expectancy went up another few years, with China only a few years behind. Now, China continues to advance with no sign of slowing down. In recent years, they've pulled ahead of us, as life expectancy in the US declines. 

The decline here is not the result of anything particularly recent. This is the impact of a political shift that happened back in the 70s, shortly after I was born. A shift that continues unabated to this day, as consequences continue to mount. It's been getting worse my entire life. It would take a massive course change for things to even begin the decades long process of turning around, and no such change is happening.

Who was king of China during that meteoric advancement of life expectancy itself? Oft compared to Hitler, Chairman Mao. Those statistics on life expectancy alone should give you pause. Holy shit, have I been lied to?

Yes. Chinese and Russian government officials alike refer to the US as the Empire of Lies. They lie all the goddamn time. This is the most important lesson I've learned in my longstanding efforts to figure out what the fuck is going on. If you believe any of it, you're falling for bullshit, I'm telling you. From Israel to Ukraine, from inflation to omicron, you've got to put in the time to sort it all out, because if you don't, you're better off not paying attention at all. 

Sometimes I stop paying attention myself, but it can be hard to turn away from watching the worst train wreck ever. Especially when I have nothing better to do, as the world seems to be coming apart. I keep thinking it's just me, but then I hear other people saying the same sorts of things all over the place. Sometimes it feels like we may only have a few years left. The way Biden's been desperately threatening Russia, China, and Iran, all at once, I'm thinking we may not even have that long. 

Or maybe this is just the virulent mindset of living through the death throes of an empire of lies.

supreme rulers

The issue of the moment is a little beyond my wheelhouse, and I don't normally comment on this sort of thing, but I have some thoughts on the overturning of Roe v. Wade. First, I just want to go over the ruling itself, as there seems to be a lot of basic ignorance of what happened exactly. 

We had a Supreme Court ruling half a century ago, giving women the constitutional right to have an abortion. This prohibits legislators from legislating otherwise, at any level, state, local, or federal. Now with it overturned, states can legislate against abortion as they see fit. Every state will be different, covering the whole gamut, depending on how religiously conservative the people in the state tend to be, etc. In most of the country, the law probably won't change.

This ruling was based on our constitutional right to privacy, the idea being that familiar slogan, "my body, my choice" - a pregnant woman should have final say over her own body, free of any government regulation. We've been treating this as settled law for decades, despite the fact that this rationale has to allow for exceptions. Once you allow for exceptions, the federal supremacy of the ruling falls apart. If there are times when our bodies can be regulated by law, every state will decide their own exceptions.

This has already been the case, to a great extent. Every state placing different restrictions, such that it was nearly impossible to get an abortion in some states already. This ruling has been a much more incremental change than people on either side want to admit. This has a whole lot to do with the specific nature of the ruling. It has always rested on precarious reasoning.

Calling abortion a privacy issue never adequately addresses abortion itself, except to create the exception for a fetus being "viable." This is a complex medical issue. We need laws that get very specific, based on modern science. The constitution doesn't say anything about it, and SCOTUS is supposed to be ruling on constitutionality. 

There needs to be a constitutional basis for SCOTUS to take up a case, and while there's risk of over-reach, laws could also be carefully crafted to avoid it. The problem is that there isn't enough support in congress to pass any such federal laws. Democrats need to win more elections, but wait, they already control both houses of congress and the presidency. They vote blue no matter who, but it turns out, it does matter who.

As always, they need to win more before they can do anything. Republicans can always dismantle progress, even while they're the minority party, and Democrats are always helpless to do anything. So they're historically unpopular these days, and unlikely to gain any seats, let alone enough to matter. Thanks to the pandemic, they've briefly taken control of government, under the brilliant leadership of a racist old clown with dementia. They've already squandered the only chance they'll get. They'll be lucky not to lose big in both 2022 and 2024.

What's surprising has been watching the shift in public opinion. More support for the overruling than I'd expected. Public opinion may turn out to be an additional obstacle. Defining fetal viability can be problematic. If an abortion is done carefully enough to protect the fetus, and then measures are immediately taken to keep it alive, viability shoots way up. Instead, it's almost necessary to do the opposite. You can't have aborted fetuses surviving, often with severe birth defects, but occasionally entirely healthy. Holy shit would that complicate the issue. No worries, though. They never survive..?

Lots of countries have settled around limits of 12-16 weeks, because it does become a much more complicated issue shortly thereafter. Many US states put the limit at 22 weeks, but some go to 27 and beyond. Roe v. Wade was never really an adequate basis for abortion law. Striking it down is unfortunate, but a relatively incremental change to an existing controversy in this country. 

Public opinion may not be on Democrats' side anymore. They can't win elections anyhow. Even when they do, they can't legislate anything but corporate tax cuts, bailouts, and ever increasing funds for war. They haven't held a majority in the Supreme Court ever, in my entire life. They certainly won't be turning that around any time soon.

Like everything else in US politics, sorry, but it's not going to be getting better. All evidence seems to suggest it's only getting worse. China's doing pretty well though. Abortions are safe and legal there. Russia, too. While suicide rates in the US have doubled in the last two decades, suicide rates in Russia have fallen by half in the same time frame. The yuan may replace the dollar as standard global currency, soon. I hear the ruble is also doing pretty well. 

All is not hopeless, just the west and the corrupt imbeciles ruling over us here.

fireworks and mass shootings

Multiple mass shootings, the loss of civil rights, while the American people are milked dry to fund war crimes around the world. Happy Independence Day, everyone. America the beautiful, home of a dying empire. I don't care about gun control, or mental health services. I want to live in a country that doesn't drive its people to such insanity in the first place.

Liberals aren't feeling very celebratory this year. I never have been, but feeling less patriotic than ever. This country is never going to get better. Eventually, it's just going to implode, and that can't come soon enough. I didn't even leave my apartment this 4th of July. Was no one having any get togethers, or maybe I just wasn't invited on account of being a Putinist.

I neither know nor care. I wasn't feeling up to going anywhere. I've been training hard, my arms and legs in dire need of the recovery time. 

face punching

"If there were no contradictions, no struggle, there would no world, no process, no life. There would be nothing at all." ~Mao Zedong

It does feel a little weird to normalize being punched in the face. It feels weird to talk to others about it, for whom it is not normal at all, and rather concerning. The type of "martial arts" I do is the real deal though. We're not doing kata or point sparring. I got hit in jaw pretty hard on Sunday, such that it still hurts a little to chew. My sparring partner immediately apologized, as we're not supposed to be sparring that hard, but these things happen. Pretty regularly. 

Also caught a hard elbow to the nose during open mat BJJ on Friday. On Wednesday, my face collided with the shoulder of a guy who outweighs me by 70 lbs. A no-fault accident that could have just as easily happened while playing volleyball, but it was the hardest impact I've taken doing any of this. I had to sit down for a few. It was the one time I've thought, ah crap, there goes a few brain cells.

I often think of how crazy this sounds to people, that I subject myself to this, but I love it. Before the pandemic, we almost never did any sparring. The little we did was terrible. I had so much to learn. There were open workouts I never went to, and maybe sparring went on then, but I'm not sure. They had a sparring class that came and went. There seemed to be a lack of interest in it.

Now, we spar all the time. I don't know what changed. The whole world seems to have changed. Sparring is my favorite part of all this, second only to actually stepping into the ring. Ok, I haven't tried that yet, but I find myself hoping that's where this is going. I never thought I'd be doing this well at my age. I was happy to be able to do it at all, but I keep doing better and the carrot on the stick always seems to be out of reach.

I can tell myself stories of how things should be. I can imagine how easily they could be that way, but my imagination does not contain all the building blocks my reality does. The models we create in our minds being a cartoonish simplification of why things are the way they are. We are bound to leave a lot out, thus concluding how easily things could be different.

It's important to healthy brain function to want things, and to strive for that. To feel capable of striving for that. The carrot is important. Striving is often difficult, unpleasant, even painful. It's important to get over the idea that pain is inherently bad; that suffering is inherently bad. It's ok that getting what we want just means wanting something else, too. The real purpose of it all is not to get what we want, but to live. 

This is just living in a reality that is entirely transient. Everything is process. The very concept of getting what we want ceases to make sense. Contradictory as it may seem, the healthy part is that we want, regardless. If you want to end the suffering of all beings like a good Buddhist is supposed to, that's great, but for now, I want to train. I want to fight. I want to live.

My brain function being rather less than healthy, I've had trouble finding much that I both want and deem myself having any chance of achieving. I lost interest in things, no pain or suffering being worth enduring, just to be miserable anyhow. I wanted nothing, I strove for nothing, I achieved nothing. 

I protected myself, and maybe I needed the protection. Maybe in retrospect, I underestimate all the realities of what I was going through. I form an ideal model of what could have been, leaving a whole lot out. You might say I survived and award me points for that, but it doesn't really matter. It serves as an example of a vicious cycle best avoided if at all possible. Not wanting anything, not caring about anything, falling into despair and finding myself ever more trapped in the mire.

In some sense, I'm talking about decades past. In another, I'm talking about last month. It's still a constant battle, that for the time being, I'm pulling ahead of again. I always seem to get knocked back down, and I don't know why. I fear the day I won't get back up ever again, but I guess that's life, too.

This of all things, I've decided I'm capable of, and the whole world opens up for me like it never has before. I'm learning how to deal with that, way behind schedule. I've yet got a ways to go and may never get there, but it's a process.

individualist regime

The US is an especially terrible capitalist country in large part due to our cult of individualism. We could call it capitalism taken to an extreme, although I'm not entirely sure our wrongheaded economic system is to blame. It could be the direction capitalism always ends up going. For now though, it's fairly distinctive to the US. Lots of countries share similar problems, but America is number one, world leader in radicalized selfishness.

I think a lot of our problems stem from this. Living here my entire life, a lot of my problems surely stem from this was well. It's interesting to me that we can look at problems in different ways, all of them true, but leading to entirely different conclusions and consequences.

Do I blame myself, or do I blame society? Do I blame the past or the present? Everything is intertwined, all of it factoring into the current situation, but one can negate the other, instead of balancing it. Blame society, and I might feel better about myself, feeling righteously helpless to do anything about it. If I blame myself, I'll feel terrible, but potentially, just maybe, do something differently.

It's also this intertwining of factors giving rise to everything in life. Pratityasamutpada. This includes people, and everything about who we are. We base our society on this rank delusion that we're all individuals capable of doing whatever we want. Anyone being trampled by our ludicrous system deserves it. Don't blame reality, only blame yourself.

Just don't blame yourself out loud. Nobody wants to hear the negativity. Grab those bootstraps and shut the fuck up about it.

So, I'm this lone crazy person, ranting into a void. I could be yelling at strangers on a street corner, but instead I just blog. How normal the view that society is fine, while I'm essentially projecting my mental illness?

People largely seem a lot happier than me, I do have to concede. On the other hand, I don't meet the ones in prison, or living on the streets. I don't meet the ones living in trailers and ghettos watching TV all day every day. Most of them don't even tweet. Suicide rates and drug overdoses have doubled in the US over the last twenty years. I don't meet the casualties of that, either.

just depression

So, I've realized that I hate my circumstances, I hate my life, I hate what I've become. Take away all the excuses and stories I've told myself all these years, and essentially, I hate myself. I hate the world for making me feel this way. I'm drowning in a sea of negativity and all anyone can tell me is that I should regret all this negativity, too.

And I wonder, is this how I've always felt? Have I exposed this ugly rot at the very foundation of my existence, or am I just so depressed, I'm putting a negative spin on my entire life? I talk about my medical condition and how it impacted my childhood, but what we know about self-esteem is that goes back further than that. It develops during early childhood and has more to do with relations and behaviors of caregivers, shading everything that happens afterwards.

I've spent my entire life begging the world to save me from this, but the world doesn't do that sort of thing. My whole life has been nothing but failure and misery. I can't lie to myself about that anymore. I'm trying to pull it together to get back to the gym, but how much does that even matter when I always end up back here. It's the only positive thing I've ever done, and it's been increasingly difficult to keep doing it. If only I had someone to go with, blah blah blah.

The last few years have been horrific, and I hate that instead of demonstrating any resilience or wisdom, I've only crumpled. It's not my fault, because this, because that, but it is what it is, I am what I am, and I fucking hate it.

Then I got to the gym. Maybe writing helps. My knee is fine. All puffy and weird, but relatively fine. My back is fine. The inflammation in my neck is 99.7% gone. My wrists hurt. All this is frustrating, but I got to the gym, it was fine, and I feel a lot better. It's a great painkiller, but painkillers tend to wear off.

I'm torn between listing all these valid reasons for feeling bad about myself, and thinking it's got nothing to do with any of that. It's a childhood development issue. I may have an entirely valid list, but so do lots of people. Life is rough for a lot of the world, and we tend to suck at dealing with that. This isn't to make excuses, but to point out that we're supposed to have self-esteem anyhow. Some people really are hated by everyone, and still feel ok about themselves. Why? Because that's how the brain is supposed to work.

commodities

I used to think that I like myself, and that was basically self-esteem. For years, I'd mull over the contradictions of thinking I like myself even if I have no worth to others. It didn't seem to add up.

What did I like about myself? What does it mean to like myself? I would read my blog, agree with my past proclamations, admire my choice of words. I'd like who that person seems to be. I might even argue that it's longwinded rambling about ourselves that best covers who we are. I wasn't sure what to make of the reality that this isn't a version of me that other people see at all. The people I meet out in the world haven't read my blog. By a fairly overwhelming margin, they don't want to.

The self is not a real objective thing. It's a trick of perspective, generally thought about in terms of looking for our own, but who we are is no less the behavior we exhibit around other people. People who don't think about who we are as separate from our circumstances. If someone has no legs, we don't think of them as who they'd be, with legs. When we consider ourselves, we might think this isn't me, this is just my circumstances. When we consider someone else, it's all the same. It's not your fault if you don't have legs, but it is what it is.

To assess the value or worth of something is not to measure an intrinsic quality, but how much weight it carries in a transaction. This requires interactions between people, and means nothing on its own. Self-worth is not a question of whether we like ourselves, but of whether we expect to be valued. Not necessarily liked, but valued.

To some extent, self-worth is a rational calculation we can try to make in any given situation, but it's also a core component of the human psyche. The person who expects the world to bend over backwards for them has an overinflated sense of self-worth. The less what we want matters, the less motivated we'll be to do much of anything, but escape. When we assess how much it matters what we want or need, and how much should be done to accommodate that, it's an assessment of how much we matter. 

I've always tried to be humble. I'm fine. I want nothing. Leave me alone to inexplicably wither away.

the missing piece

I have to be very careful about gaming. Selective about when I pick up a new title. What kind of game is it. I might stop caring about everything else for a while. Used selectively enough, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it mostly is. I've thought a lot about why gaming in particular, comparing it to other vices and interests. It's not simply an addiction or an escape. There's something more specific that hooks a certain type.

I'm an "achievement" type player to a great extent. That is, I'm most drawn to playing a game in which my character is always getting stronger, progressing in some way themselves, not just passing through a game world or story. I like games that start out ridiculously difficult, but I get to the point where I can walk around their fantastical hellscapes pretty safely, with no more challenges to grow stronger overcoming. The game loses something, and I return to reality, having achieved nothing at all.

Aforementioned feelings of learned hopelessness are all about achievement. It's the feeling there's nothing I can do that's going to get me anywhere. To be obsessed with a game is to be starved for feelings of achievement. Gaming can be especially addictive for the type of people who feel hopeless about making any progress in their own lives. So unlike real life, games promise progress. Just play them and you'll get somewhere. 

What can I achieve in life? Why did I stop doing any kind of art or music? Never striving for anything academically or vocationally or socially or anything at all ever? 

Nothing felt like an achievement. Thus, no achievement seemed possible. Nothing I did would be of any value to anyone. Nothing I strive for will matter.

There's a logical chain to it, but I'm still just trying to put the pieces together. My life's work of trying to figure out why my brain doesn't work. I've long compared it to feeling incomplete, like a car in which the wheels are not connected to the engine. The drive shaft, should I say? The metal turnie thingies? I don't know cars very well, but I understand that everything has to be causally connected. Engines don't turn wheels just because they really want to.

I hesitate to even volunteer help for people, for fear that the help from me would be unwanted. I'd be inept, in the way, whatever the framing, nothing I do will be of value to anyone. Applying for a job means tricking someone into thinking they'd want to hire me. An endeavor, like all endeavors, I'm sure to fail at. I don't know why I feel that way, but it makes some sense to me that it could be the sort of missing piece needed to make the wheels turn.

It's like the reward axis manifests on a psychological level. The psychological characteristics may be more immutable than they should be, if they're the product of an underlying neurochemistry, brewed by the interplay of environment and biology. This is why we can be aware that we feel a given way, and that it's problematic or even wrong, while being unable to choose feeling differently. It's not that simple.

Yet, other people seem to go about their lives as if they're in a video game, in which if you want to do something, you go do it. If something makes sense, act on it. Doesn't matter that they mostly fail every which way and very little they do makes sense, if a person's sense of self-worth is functioning properly. 

That the missing piece would be one's own sense of self-worth just seems obvious now. Mine's been crudely stitched together with delusions of exceptionalism my entire life. Twice exceptional, even. I'm not sure how to actually fix it. One might say I've learned that I'm helpless to do so. Maybe I am. 

learned hopelessness

 I remember this line I scrawled in my journal, when I was a kid. More anarchist than communist in those days, it went something like, fuck their games, fuck their rules, I'd sooner lose than play with fools. 

I was full of ideas as to how things should be, which is fine and all, but if only I could have been convinced to accept that this is the world we live in. We only have a short time to make the most of it. It seems crazy to openly admit to preferring to throw it away over some sort of ideological pride. Almost on par with holding my breath until they give us communism.

I don't know how much value to place in all that, when I realize that it was all just this post facto rationalization thing the brain does. It may have some truth to it, but the underlying rationale had more to do with learned hopelessness. I wasn't like other kids. I was never going to have a life like theirs. I'd often feel enraged about it. It wasn't fair. 

All the more confusing, because I never really knew what made me different. My intelligence, my sensitivity, a more highly tuned sense of ethics? Hmm, that sounds suspiciously cliché, honestly. Was it that other kids treated me like I was different my entire childhood, when I was years behind them all developmentally? I wasn't bullied, I just wasn't one of them. I had no peers. Maybe that has a way of imprinting on a person's sense of self.

Always refusing to adapt, proudly standing my ground, because I deeply believed it was not a challenge I could conceivably overcome. If people didn't value me, they could fuck off. That seems reasonable on some level, and yet.. maybe put some thought and effort into doing something valuable? That was literally inconceivable to me. I don't know what I'd have to do, but it would never work. Even the things I am best at, I expect no one to value. Incidentally, this is fundamentally terrible for motivation.

Other aspects of my childhood sure didn't help with that mindset. Maybe I'll always feel different due to development back then, but now I'm also different because people don't know what it's like to scrape by like Gollum their entire lives. Nobody wants in on this, not even me. I'm honestly not sure if I'm still that tiny little kid in junior high, telling everyone to fuck off preemptively - or if they still treat me like I'm different, and I'm just reacting to that.

Social efforts have been feeling rather hopeless though. Going to a picnic made me want to crawl into a hole for a month.

anatomy of misanthropy

 As the prospect of overcoming mental health problems grows an ever more distant memory, I can see the anatomy of the isolation and misanthropy that develops. Being around people makes me feel inferior. They don't frame it that way for the most part, but on all different levels, the lack of interest or enthusiasm for anything, the hesitance to express anything, discombobulated and anxious, I don't work or drive and pay for my food with food stamps. I'm not an independent grown-up like they are. My value as a fellow human being seems to be in the gutter. 

I protected myself from that my entire life by distancing myself from it. Fuck it all. Fuck this grotesquely unequal society. Fuck people. 

The problem is that people are all that actually matters in this world, as far as much of our neurochemistry is concerned. I wasted my entire life, protecting myself. So I'm trying to change, but all this pressure is making me miserable. I just want to be alone, but my defenses are gone. That just makes me more miserable.

In turn, all this misery makes for even less of a winning personality. Less motivated, less interest in anything, more cynical and bitter about everything. It becomes so hard to even get to the gym where others might see what a failure of a person I am. Getting to the gym is supposed to be the one thing that helps, but I guess it depends on how bad the mental health gets.

late spring

Cold and wet lately, but it's felt like summer for a while. Feels odd that's it's not summer at all yet. I'm feeling disconnected from it either way because I haven't been leaving the house much.

Physically and emotionally collapsed, but not sure which precipitated the other. I certainly didn't throw my back out on purpose, nor imagine being unable to turn to my left for a week. Should give my knees some time to rest anyhow, I figured. And my wrists, my neck, and whatever else. Then my left knee swelled with fluid over the kneecap, like my body is trying to make its own knee pad. It doesn't work well. It should go away on its own, but maybe it needs to be drained, I don't know.

I was emotionally collapsing anyhow. On some level, afraid I'm exaggerating and imagining my injuries because I just want an excuse to go back to sleeping all day. I hate sleeping all day. I hate that everything is so hard. Even trying to socialize is this monumental effort. I hate the lifelong desperate escapism that comes with life being more traumatizing than it was supposed to be. I'm losing hope that whatever progress I've made is ever going to be enough that I might become human.

I used to be proud of my writing. Now I find it embarrassing and pointless. Some part of me says to keep doing it, some other part of me can't always help it, but I'd rather people not know about it. Who am I but this collection of neurosis and complaining. It's been difficult finding common interests with anyone when I don't like or take interest in much of anything anymore. 

I haven't been able to get to the gym in a few weeks, let alone compete in anything.

mid-spring

 After rolling with a purple belt tonight, he asked me, "what do you do for cardio," as if he were impressed. I've been working so hard at this. Thank you. Thank you so much. 

"Just lots of this," I responded with a big grin on my face.

I was being aggressive because I knew he was a purple belt. I'm aggressive when I think my opponent can handle it, but not everyone gets the compliment. This guy was a little bigger than me and a purple belt in BJJ, but not Judo. Sometimes that means they're not great with takedowns. He was really good at getting back up though, which gave me the chance to take him down over and over. 

Another competition coming up. I should do it. This one's small and right in Burlington. Feeling mostly nervous and not really into it, but it's my best chance to give it a try. 

A going away party for one of the people I've trained with is also coming up. Turns out, it's just a few blocks from where I live, so I have no excuse not to go to that, either. I've been fretting about what kind of food to bring. I'm thinking I probably can't go wrong with beer.

My plants have had a number of issues this year, from a leaf-miner infestation, to some bad lighting choices, to nobody pruning them. They're long and spindly and not doing so well, so I'm going to put them all outside soon. Then clean out my greenhouse. It's full of dead leaves, cobwebs, and assorted other crap. I've already started a bunch of new seedlings to refill it.

and that's pretty much my entire life these days, with lots of space in between where I just lay around listlessly.

how's it going

My grandmother was one of my most favorite people in the world. I've often felt regret that I only knew her as a child. She left this world when I was about twelve, quite a few years before I could interact with adults as an adult and really get to know them. I understood things differently as a child. Children don't ask how you're doing when they say hello, because they don't really care yet.

Another great person who passed much more recently was her brother. We conversed many times as adults, although never as much as I would have liked. Still, in some sense it feels like I never interacted with him as an adult, either. I was so wrapped up in myself, even ten years ago, I was like a kid that just wanted someone to tell stories to. 

I had trouble with greetings like "hey, how are you" because it felt insincere. People don't really want an answer, right? Only now does it occur to me that I felt that way, because I was the one that didn't care. If someone was hurt or needed help, I cared in that sense. I just didn't want to hear anyone else's stories. I was incurious, at best. 

I tried to be a good listener, but I certainly wasn't proactive about it. I also had a very hard time asking questions. I'd think because it felt too aggressive or something, I wasn't sure it was appropriate. Beneath all that, it never occurred to me that questions weren't just a good social skill, but that I should take interest in the answers. I didn't even notice the deficit. It becomes easier to ask, when I actually care.

Even engaging with people I've known more recently, I've been more walled off than I'd even realized. In my own world to a great extent, like my father was. Something seems to have shifted in me, coming out of the pandemic. It's distressing to realize how little I've really been present in my interactions with people all my life. I could have had so many questions, but couldn't think of even one.

I don't know why. I was always trying. For what, I was never sure. I'm still quite lost. I'm not sure how much progress I've really made, but this past year has been substantively different. Before the pandemic, I was always hiding in the corner of the gym. Of course I wasn't going to ask anyone how they were doing. Then they'd just try to talk to me. 

Now I say it all the time. Turns out, people often do have real answers.

ministry of truth

"When fascism comes to America" it will come from those calling everyone else fascists, apparently.

"The next war in Europe will be Russia vs fascism, only fascism will be called democracy." -Fidel Castro

Liberals have been crushing dissent with censorship and media control for years, under the guise of fighting misinformation but now they're taking it a step further, making it official. The Department of Homeland Security now has a new arm, the Disinformation Governance Board.

As I've gone from following the news in different ways over the years, I've thought a lot about why people disagree. Often people with fundamentally similar principles will be at each other's throats over differences in the stories they've been told. 

Some people believe Putin has been a great leader. Others think he's a mad dictator whose done nothing but evil. The truth isn't merely somewhere in between. It's not that some people think murdering journalists is ok, and others are against it. People are being told entirely different stories. Why are you being told these vague stories about Putin killing journalists but nothing about Julian Assange? You can't even directly challenge any individual piece of the story, because they're all intertwined into a whole narrative.

It's also a mistake to think THEY'RE being fed propaganda, while I'M watching a free press. Russia isn't North Korea. They have access to the internet, they have lots of different media outlets, alternative and opposition media. Much like us, they can choose to believe what they're told, or they can choose to dig deeper. Much like us, they mostly choose to believe what they're told, including most media outlets.

This is why it's so powerful to control the media the way our corporations do. Instead of state propaganda, we have corporate control over both government and media. They fell behind for a few years with social media taking off, but now they've got it back under control. I don't have much faith in Elon Musk, but it's been amusing watching the liberal freakout over the prospect of losing that control on even a single major platform.

So, this is why we disagree. I follow media that the Ministry of Truth would call disinformation. Liberals seem to think that it makes sense to crack down on anything that runs counter to their narratives. Look how problematic all this dissent has been, right?

Biden has the lowest presidential approval rating in modern American history. They'll tell us that's just misinformation too. Putin has an approval rating in the seventies. More misinformation, I know.. He doesn't need to throw his political opponents in jail. It's the US that's had to manipulate elections such that we keep electing people everyone hates. There's an argument to be made that the US has become less democratic than Russia.

I think it's rising fascism. We're an empire in decline, with the largest military in the world, which we use to brutalize country after country, far worse than anything Russia's doing. According to the array of stories I've chosen to believe, it's the US that needs to be stopped.

Crazy implausible that we could be stopped, except that it may happen naturally in the near future. With the US in decline, as China is ascending, they may overtake us, taking over the world economy. Sanctioning the US if they have to. Most of the world would switch to their side in a heartbeat. Our economy will be smoldering rubble. We won't take it well. There will surely be lots of chaos, maybe even balkanization. These things happen.

I'm well aware that my sources aren't perfect though. The narrative I've pieced together may be flawed. We do the best we can.

what is fun

I've often wondered about how unfamiliar I am with having fun. I'd think about my various leisure activities and, am I having fun with any of them? Not really, no. Entertained, passing the time, but what is this "fun" I keep hearing about?

Sparring and grappling can be fun. That was a clue. Maybe I'm not biologically incapable of it, after all. So, why do I suddenly find myself capable of having fun, only in this narrow way? Well, it's the only thing I do with other people. 

Who sits around and has fun by themselves? Maybe you enjoy yourself and can keep yourself amused, but is it fun, exactly? Really? Probably not something most people have any reason to think about. You don't need to be having fun all the time, but you know what fun is.

Or rather, you've experienced it, but probably don't think much about what it is. How many examples of it just happen to involve being with others? Take examples that don't seem social at all, like riding a roller coaster, and imagine riding it alone. Something would be missing.

Some would push back on this, while others might think it's just common sense, but it occurs to me that I haven't had much fun in my life, because it's not something people generally feel when they're alone. I've had so little fun in my life that I've thought my brain defective, when really the internal chemistry is lacking, because it's predicated on external experience that's lacking.

This is a hard problem though. Even setting aside my myriad social issues, it's common for people in this country to find themselves isolated from any semblance of community, lacking friends or people to do anything with. Loneliness is an epidemic in the US, for all sorts of reasons, while I'm here still struggling just learning to speak human.

overcome

I'm not sure it's a good idea, but I find myself wanting to tell everyone how sick I used to be, even with the caveat that I'm not entirely better. I always want to share my excuses for not excelling at everything, so that people will cut me some slack for existing, but this is a little different.

Rather than see me as a normal person with poor social skills, I want people to know I was an agoraphobic type who barely left my apartment for decades, rarely interacting with humanity at all. 

This probably needs explaining, but in conversation, everything needs to be kept simple. I did step out of my shell on occasion. I was capable of it when it had to be done. I just really hated it. If we're measuring the amount of time I spend out in the world, it could be a rounding error. Somehow I moved around the country, but never left my apartments. How little I interacted with people has been shocking to me, looking back on it. 

In the moment, there are always reasons. Every moment can feel like a special case. For countless different reasons that were all really just one reason, I've gone my entire life without meeting people. Of course that's going to have negative consequences. 

I've been alone much more than not, but to be clear, I have had a few relationships. A few years ago, it struck me that they all started online, aside from the one that started in a mental ward. I was never out in the world, such that I'd ever meet and interact with people. When I lived with someone, they were the only person I'd interact with. Aside from being unhealthy for me, it was also not healthy for said relationships.

I'd make them answer doors and place orders, while I hid nearby. I'd only go grocery shopping if they went with me. I never held a job, because I couldn't even order a pizza, let alone dare a job interview, let alone most jobs. Still feeling bad about the whole job thing, so I want people to know how disabled I actually was. I remember sitting in the parking lot of a community college when I was in my twenties, paralyzed with fear of even getting out of the car. People my own age in all directions. They all looked so grown up.

Ever since going back to school, I've been having this recurring experience wherein I open my mouth in an attempt to express what I'm thinking, only to realize I don't know how to put it into words - but too late, I'm already trying to say things. Isn't my brain supposed to do this automatically? I'm practicing, I guess.

I have a ways to go, but I wish people knew where I was coming from. Now that it's behind me, I'm able to admit just how bad it really was. I was terrified of people. Now it's more accurate to say they make me anxious. I spent my whole life avoiding humanity, compounding the problem, but now I'm working on overcoming it.

If I do well enough at the kickboxing and judo, I have this notion that I'll get some extra slack. I hope it makes up for botching the talking to people bit.

progressive decline

I've been making all sorts of progress lately, but it's never enough. I never know where I'm going or if I'll get there in time. I'm not sure any of it matters, but I'm terrified of losing whatever I can scrape together. Almost there.. Almost.. where again? 

I've kept a lot of it to myself. As much as I lay it all out here, it's difficult to convey just how bad it's been. When I moved into this apartment, I never met the woman who lived upstairs. I'd see her come and go from work every day, but almost never went outside. We never ran into each other. I made sure of that. A year later, she was gone, a new tenant in her place. Never met him, either. Or the woman he lived with, who lived there alone while he was being held in immigrant detention. I never found out what happened with that. I was terrified of them all, for no good reason. They're long gone now. 

I've had many conversation with the guy who lives upstairs from me now. He's been there since before I tried going to college. Around that time, I stopped hiding from people. I was proud of myself. What do I do? I'm going to college! It helped me find the courage to start facing people. It's happened gradually and I still have a long way to go, but I'm doing a lot better. This is just one example. 

A few students volunteer to mop the gym mats at the end of classes. Before the pandemic, I made excuses, and never helped. It made me nervous. When I got back, I just started doing it, too. As I've been warming up to the notion of competing, it occurred to me that a year ago, I wouldn't have even considered it. A year isn't that long, and there have been setbacks.

I'm getting pretty good at BJJ, but at participating in the community too. Going to events, asking for rides when I need to. There's an annual barbecue coming up, after being suspended these last two years. I never went before. Why would I want to? How would I get there? Do I even want anything to do with it?

Now, I know I can just ask for a ride, hang out, get to know some of my training partners better, drink beer. Why not?

I miss thinking I was going to college, getting a career, bee-lining for adult human normalcy, but I think it was always a fantasy. The way things were going, I would have finished my associates degree without any idea of where to go from there. An achievement, sure, but hardly all that motivating on its own.

This progress I've been making instead, I don't know if it's leading anywhere either, but it's more fundamental. I've realized that I need to be honest about just how much of a deficit I'm trying to overcome, here. I talk to people regularly these days. That's not a baby step.

presumptive matrix

As I've fallen back into arguing about the news a lot, I've been thinking about why almost nobody ever changes their minds. Those that do, generally take a long time to come around. It takes a long time for the influx of new evidence and ideas to outweigh everything we've cobbled together already. Not just everything about any given argument, but the entire worldview of context it exists in.

If we're arguing about a given conflict, every piece of the puzzle we throw at each other will be understood within the context of our ideological adversary's existing understanding of the whole situation; everyone and everything involved in that understanding, reinforcing it.

On every issue, there are competing narratives. Entire stories built on countless instances of deceit by the bad guys, and heroic deeds by of our allies. Each event, such as a missile attack on civilians, where both sides blame the other. No matter what the facts suggest, if you're standing with Ukraine, it's going to sound highly implausible that they'd do anything like that - while of course Russia would. 

"In the face of so much horror, Europe cannot turn away!"

A whole matrix of presumptions reinforces our understanding of any facts or events in question. If you've only been getting one side of the story, event after event, hearing the other side will sound preposterous. Our ingrained understanding of context outweigh the evidence, such that contradicting information will look like deceit; Russians trying to frame Ukraine, or vice versa. Every opposing detail in the narrative can look like misinformation.

Argument becomes pointless, tedious, and frustrating. As long as someone is following the same media, that will offset other perspectives they encounter. The countervailing information coming in will have much further to go to ever exceed the reinforcement of the established narrative. Changing minds takes time, but it's also rare that it happens at all. 

I don't know why I care so much. We're all just animals scurrying about doing the best we can to live our lives. Following world events can be a fine hobby, but it doesn't matter so much that I should get all upset about everyone else's terrible opinions.

I'm unstable, reactive, and emotional, vulnerable to negativity. I get wrapped up in it, addicted to grappling with it. I have nothing better to do. When mental health is stronger, mountains become mole hills. So I think a lot about what's making me unhealthy. Loneliness is a good bet, but it's all speculation. I often fear it's just an excuse. I shouldn't need people like this. I should be stronger.

Others seem to take each other for granted though. How important it is to have people to go through the good and the bad with. Not just people to spend time with, but people to lean on when life gets traumatizing. Trauma disorders occur not only when we experience a traumatic event - many people survive such events without developing disorders. The number one difference between severity of outcomes has not been found to be the severity of trauma, but whether victims of trauma had supportive people in their lives to help them through it.

I'm not special. It just really sucks that everyone else has such terrible opinions.

bad days

The Buddhist koan of the original face is about questioning who we are, with every layer of circumstance peeled away. Koans are typically unanswerable, intended to be pondered indefinitely, as a practice of mental focus. There is no original face to be found.

I got to the gym on Monday, and again yesterday. Skipped today. I woke up feeling miserable this morning. I have no idea why. I haven't been sleeping well. I keep trying to take naps because my sore joints and muscles really need it. I find it impossible to care about anything or to want to do anything, except training. The scrap of driftwood I cling to in an ocean of despair.

I couldn't seem to pull out of it all day. I wasn't very creative in my efforts to try, only occurring in retrospect that laying around doing nothing was probably the worst thing I could do. As is typical of such states, I didn't think of anything better at the time. I was too apathetic and distracted by feeling sorry for myself, hoping it would just go away.

Depression is another aspect of who I am that I find difficult to feel very good about, in large part due to how rare it is for anyone else to feel good about it. I dabbled in the goth thing decades back and still tend to dress in black, trench coat and all. Holding on to some piece of myself that had a lot to do with trying to see something good in being miserable. Hoping to find people who could see it that way too. People like me.

Who I am, based on circumstances, like how depressed I am when I wake up in the morning, and my brain's malfunctioning abilities to manage that. I understand why part of me tries to embrace it, but it's not good at all. My whole life has been shaped by it, mangled by it. It's not fair that this is such a consequential part of who I am, but so substantial that I'm rendered socially worthless for it, to anyone who isn't in the same boat?

This is where I've realized it's possible I've been getting it wrong all my life. I don't know that people disregard everything else about me, because of this and all its consequences. People see things in all different ways, not everyone being all that judgmental. It's a difficult and frightening question, but the blanket generalization I tend to make has to be at least somewhat wrong. Self-esteem involves such deeply rooted presumptions.

Unfortunately, that has a lot to do with my actual experiences with people. In particular when I was young, my brain still developing, but as an adult, it becomes a strange question. People like each other in all different ways, and there's very little playing with toy trucks or stuffed animals. Nobody asks me if I want to play, and I don't like most of their games anyhow. I go to the gym, and people ask if I want to spar, and that works, but has its limitations. 

I don't feel like I want much else from them, but I still keep falling into depression. It's a warning light that won't stop going off, in a vehicle that's painfully just sputtering along. In theory, connecting with peers would counteract this substantial part of myself, making for less of an obstacle to being someone I'd prefer to be. That seems to be the basic mechanics of it.

Granted, it hasn't worked out that way much, but for most of my life, I was getting everything else wrong, too. Possibly for endocrinological reasons, but I've also had so much to learn. I don't understand why this is all so hard. Except that I do. I just try not to dwell on all the shit that's gone wrong, because that sure doesn't help. 

It doesn't help, but not dwelling doesn't make it go away, either.

original face

Sometimes I'd read old blog entries and think to myself, this is really good. I like the person who would write something like this. These are my thoughts, surely one of the best reflections of who I am? To like the person as I express a persona here, that is to like myself, right?

Around people, it's amazing how much I stumble to express myself. Not entirely due to ineptness. There are a variety of considerations. It would be inappropriate to tell people all about myself, when we're training together. Still, how I express myself, in that interaction, is also who I am. Arguably more so, in any consequential sense.

That person writing blogs seems largely irrelevant to who I am when it actually matters. Very little of this filters through. I try, but so much of it is just reacting. Moments of insecurity, overcompensating, anxiety. Imperfect in all sorts of ways that aren't an issue when I have time to think things through without people everywhere. This version of myself, I have more trouble reconciling with. 

Allegedly I'm responsible for this person, but I don't understand how that could be true. That I'm finally able to get myself to do anything at all is still pretty new, and to my incessant horror, relapsing these days.

Speaking of being unhappy, it feels like WW3 is coming. This time, we're the Nazis, and we've got Japan, Germany, and all of NATO on our side. It's so fitting that Ukraine is Nazi central. The new Nazism is less about Jews or Aryan supremacy, and more about western supremacy, capitalism, and murderous on an even more massive scale. It's interesting how Ukrainian lore conflates Jews and Bolsheviks though. Jews, Russians, Communists, whatever. First, they did not come for the capitalists.

On the other side, the other half of the world. We in the west are told we're the whole world all the time, but there are a number of other really big powerful countries out there. If they can't stop us economically, they all have nuclear weapons to fall back on, too.

I want to stop worrying about it. It's amazing how not engaging with any of it can make it seem like everything is fine. It feels so much more real than something I have to go out of my way to learn about. If it's not fine, worry about that when it comes, my sister would say.

It's also a dopamine fix to be on the edge of our seats, rooting for the good guys. Knowing western belligerence though, compounded by increasingly incompetent governance, there will be no winners. Team USA may keep escalating, the closer Russia comes to winning. All the way up to attacking them directly, starting a nuclear war. 

Hell, there may be a chemical attack tomorrow, and nuclear war the next day. I'm not saying it's likely, but jfc it's not supposed to even be a remote possibility.

like me

Since I was young, I've had this idea that I've taken a part of each person I've spent much time with, as part of myself. I adapt as well as I can, and in so doing, evolve to incorporate elements of who I perceive the other person to be. There are numerous pitfalls to this, and I'd like to be able to stop. 

Whenever I'm around people, I'm hypervigilant about trying to figure out where they stand, because I fear that any deviation from their values or worldview might set them off, ruining my chances of being liked. I stumble a lot, as I try to get ahead of every interaction. I awkwardly say nothing when I don't have enough information to know what's safe to say. 

I warm up to people, I relax, as I develop a basic sense of how to adapt to whatever biases they have. I stand firmly by my beliefs, by not talking about them when it won't go over well. Even my firmly held beliefs change and evolve such that I may not believe them tomorrow. I'll even set them aside to a substantial degree, in my efforts to get along with people.

In trying to figure people out, in trying to figure my self out, I've become confused as to what the self really is. The idea that we need an identity is itself nonsensical. People have attributes and characteristics, we have preferences and interests. We might prefer someone quiet, or someone loud. We might try to adjust our own volume, if we want to be liked. 

Or we might say fuck off, this is "who I am." That has often been a mindset I've strived for, going all the way back to my mohawk as a teenager. I bristled at the very notion of conformity, but that was just a positive spin on a more fundamental problem.

Someone with more social confidence won't change their behavior for others, not because they're already the same, but because they fundamentally believe that being different is not going to pose problems. I was obsessed with [non]conformity because trying to be social made me feel compelled to conform. I felt that I wouldn't be liked if I didn't. I've longed to meet people "like me" because that's the only way I'd be able to finally relax.

That I've been so antisocial for so long has compounded the problem. It doesn't help uproot the problem when I'm not exactly well liked. I'm tolerated, I'm at times respected for my abilities, but I'm also a bit weird and off-putting. It's strange trying to sort this out from self esteem. I don't think that's a reflection of how I feel about myself. It's just my assessment of the reality of it. To some extent, a self-fulfilling prophecy, but knowing that doesn't seem to change anything.

When I interact with people, I do my best not to think about it, to put myself out there as if maybe I'll be liked. I know that assuming otherwise can't possibly go well. "Be myself," though, I don't think that means anything. I try to be someone that will be liked, but realize that's a contradiction, to even try. I'm supposed to be genuine. I need to put forth more of an identity of my own, or there isn't much to like or dislike.

I can't go lecturing people at the gym about the difference between Tochka-U and Iskander missiles, or the linguistic demographics of Ukraine, in my efforts to explain why I think Putin is the good guy. Maybe most people wouldn't really care that much one way or another. At least it would be a personality, right? Or maybe they'd throw me out of the gym for being a commie. I don't know.

I'm supposed to be myself, but wait wait, not that self.

v * Z * v

In any case, the latest bit is bullshit too of course. Ukraine blew up their own train station. Russia had no motive at all.  Tochka-U fragments strongly suggest it came from Ukrainian military. These were people trying to leave for Russia, which Ukraine has been doing everything to prevent. Even claiming Russia is abducting people, when they take in refugees. The Ukrainian battalions have been shooting Ukrainian civilians if they try to use the humanitarian corridors, but now Russia controls much more of the whole area. 

Russia gave out food and humanitarian supplies in Bucha. You can see the packaging in many of the gruesome photos. Imagine learning that the people you'd given it to were executed for it, as soon as you left. It should be noteworthy that the media doesn't even ask the question. It's just assumed that every attack must have come from Russia. At the very least, acknowledge the possibility.

Western media leaves out this massive piece of context; Ukraine is a deeply divided country. So divided, they've been having a civil war since the US-backed coup drove a massive wedge into the existing division. From Odessa to Donbass, Ukraine is Russian-speaking, and their government was turned against them.

Of course Ukraine would bomb their own people. They've been doing it for eight years already, killing thousands of civilians. This is a well-established, highly relevant and important fact, and that western media never mentions it is insane.

agitated outsider

I just remembered the name of my old Twitter handle. It's strange that I couldn't even remember. I get flak on Twitter sometimes, because my new account is so new. A less established account can be a red flag for all sorts of nefarious Twitter doings, apparently. One reason Twitter is such a cesspool is that it's a perfect format for arguing. People get in the habit of thinking the worst of each other, as soon as possible.

Sometimes I've explained that my old account was deleted long ago. It's made me nervous that if they should ask the name of my old identity, I'd have to concede that I couldn't even remember. I changed it a few times, as is Twitter custom. I tried to use my real name for a while, to appear more serious, and avoid the need to come up with something clever.

It's just argue-media Twitter though. Unless you're a famous brand name blue check, who you are exactly doesn't matter. It's all a bunch of one liners. A few months before leaving, we were having the police brutality riots around the country. The phrase, "outside agitator" was coming up a lot, so towards the end there, I was going by "agitated outsider." 

Nothing good ever came of that, by the way. They just beat the shit out of the protesters month after month, until they stopped. All that going on in the middle of a pandemic, too. Crazy times, and they're only getting darker. Speaking of which, I'm still feverish. Ordered some free covid tests a few days ago. I'll probably get them in 6-8 weeks, because our government is a few decades behind on everything.

Aside from the fever of about 100-101f, I have no other symptoms. Just a little sore in all the places I've had reoccurring issues. My ribs, my knee, my wrists, both shoulders. I wasn't initially inclined to chalk that up to being sick, but it's a little strange given that I haven't even been getting to the gym. I've been depressed and lethargic, but that's typically what happens when I haven't been getting to the gym.

I used to think it was important to be reassured when in doubt, to be calmed when afraid, to be cheered up when feeling bad. I figured whatever our problems may be, feeling bad only makes our chances of overcoming them worse. I believed in trusting that if we feel better, we'd be strong enough to make the difficult choices and do the harder things.

Negativity was my nemesis, causing depression and fear, making it more difficult to do anything. The worst way to get a person to do anything is to make them feel bad, right? Essentially, I had this idea that achievement comes naturally, if we don't obstruct it. A lesson learned in childhood, when it was closer to the truth. Someone should have beaten it out of me early.

I look back on my life, and wow, I really fucked up. I spent forty years making excuses for doing nothing. How I felt in the moment seemed like everything. Now it seems more apparent that we should be less concerned with how we feel, and more with what we're seeking to experience and achieve. We shouldn't be afraid of pain, suffering, or feeling bad. This is just life. The real tragedy is in a life unlived.

It feels like my options are a lot more limited than they used to be. I am taking my own advice to some extent, but still making excuses. I've been making progress, but I'm just about out of runway. Sucks. I have all sorts of great excuses. I ask myself though, is this really the best you could do? Is this the life you want to claim as your own? Looking at everything that went wrong and went right, at who I think I am.. this? Really? 

Fuck you. That's insulting as hell. I should have done so much more than this. Whatever my limitations, I should have become so much more than this.

I compared my situation to that of an old plant, recently. One that's overgrown and dying because it hasn't been well taken care of or pruned. Sometimes the best way to save it to prune almost everything away. Refocus all its energy on the healthiest parts, by getting rid of everything else. That's what I've been doing with training. I cut almost everything else out of my life. I've barely even been taking care of my plants. I devote every bit of energy I can to getting to the gym as often as I can. Which is to say, not nearly as often as it would be if I were younger.

Sometimes it's too late. You do everything to save a plant, but it's a process, and sometimes the countervailing processes of atrophy and death come along more quickly. For quite a while, it can be difficult to tell which way it will go.

v * Z * v

The Bucha Massacre is a propaganda operation by Ukraine to frame Russia for a massacre that never occurred. Your first clue should be the media frenzy to escalate the conflict. Working as intended. Second, look at the original claim that Russians executed these people before leaving, proven by satellite imagery showing the bodies have been there for weeks? Uh, which is it? 

Why does it matter? Weeks ago is a whole other story, and it only explains some of the bodies. Many of them seem to be the Russian sympathizers and "saboteurs" killed by Ukraine after Russia left. Others are random victims of shelling and the like. In other words, they're getting bodies from anywhere they can to concoct this story. There's no evidence of an actual massacre.

It's war, so of course it's tragic. The images are horrifying, of so many people who died in terrible ways. So many lives abruptly unlived. This is why the US should never have been fucking around in Ukraine in the first place, and why Zelenskiy needs to take Russia's peace deal.

thermometer

Finally bought a thermometer last week. I've been meaning to do that for a few years now. Never got around to it until now, years into a pandemic. I feel like this is a good illustration for how dysfunctional I am. Whatever else I might say about why I never get around to shit, I wonder if there's something fundamentally off about how I live day to day.

Sometimes it seems like the small things, the easiest things, which make the best examples. I've been to the pharmacy many times. I make a list, I have prescriptions to pick up, an immediate need to go, which I have no problem with. Thermometer just never made it onto the list for some reason. I never get anything, unless I remember to put it on the list before I leave my apartment. I've learned to cope, but things can still slip through the many cracks in my organizational efforts.

Picking up a thermometer was always in the background, but it took a really long time for it to click that the pharmacy was the best place to pick it up. It's not merely that I never got around to doing it. I never even got around to thinking about it. There were many times these past few years that I've thought it would be nice if I had a way of checking my temperature. Now imagine how much worse I am at dealing with bigger issues.

Now that I have it, I'm not sure it's accurate. Don't these things have to be? It will tell me 101.8, and then 100.3 a minute later. I keep checking because it gives me a different reading every time, but it's always been elevated. I miss the simple glass tube filled with mercury. I'm like an old man who can't figure out this newfangled technology, but it's not that complicated. I'm not sticking it in different places every time, or trying it after a cup of tea.

I don't really have any symptoms, aside from feeling run down. Feeling the worst today, but fever finally seems to be mostly gone. Which is to say, I have no symptoms at all now, aside from feeling vaguely crappy, and that could mean I'm back to normal. Sometimes being sick feels like a break from feeling normal. It can be hard to tell if I'm feeling sick, or just crappy for no reason. So, finally I have this thermometer which was supposed to clarify things.

z * Z * z

Everything is an information war. It's really incredible that even now, almost every argument I get into immediately exposes complete ignorance of the Euromaidan. You know, the US backed far-right coup in 2014, that replaced Ukraine's government with Russia-hating fascists? You know, the civil war that's been going on ever since? 14,000 dead Ukrainians? Doesn't ring a bell?

What, you don't know anything about it, but think it sounds like Russian propaganda? 

There's no getting around that. It's just sad. People largely trust mainstream media, and think others are nuts for trusting random YouTubers, instead. I figure that must be how it looks, but no, there's a little more to it than that. Finding an array of independent journalists and following their work across various platforms can be more of a process than flipping on MSNBC every night.

It bugs me to get into any clashes about which side is winning. From what I can tell, Russia is winning by an overwhelming margin, but taking more losses than what some may have expected. There are reasons for that, but it doesn't say much about the overall direction of the conflict, in which Ukraine is severely outmatched. I hate being put into a position of talking about death and destruction as if I think any of it is good or positive.

It's surreal how many people think Russia is losing though. I don't want to argue, like we're talking about sports teams, like I'm trying to gloat about how well my preferred side is doing. The western propaganda machine seems to be pushing this crazy narrative of Russia being massacred left and right, when Ukraine is actually losing TEN TIMES as many combatants. 

They're pushing this narrative so that we keep pouring weapons and funding into prolonging the conflict. They don't care how many Ukrainians have to die to drag this out, but they have to sell billions in war spending to a populace that might care how futile it is. So there's all these Ukraphiles gloating about how Russia's getting smashed. It's disturbing to see so many cheering a winning team that's actually being massacred. 

Ukraine may be winning the information war, but Russia's busy fighting an actual war. We hear these phrases over and over; that it's "unprovoked" and a "war of aggression" because those are the precise terms which make it a war crime. It's a lie though. It was indisputably provoked, but more legally significant, it was not a war of aggression. It was a war of collective defense, of the Ukrainian separatists along with thousands of civilians being killed by the Ukrainian military in Donetsk and Luhansk. That's why western media tries to sweep that entire part of the story under the rug. Nothing to see here, pretend it never happened.

Seems Russia may have to take Donbass by force, but they've nearly succeeded at that. They were never after Kiev. This will leave nothing left to negotiate but NATO neutrality. Meanwhile, the west can't stop shooting ourselves in the foot economically, while Russia succeeds with their new gold-backed petroruble.

My hope for humanity now lies in the downfall of the US and western hegemony.

super spreader

Got to the grappling tournament yesterday. Much more of an ordeal than expected. The word "shitshow" was used repeatedly to describe the crowding and disorganization. Apparently, not the best representation of how these events usually go. On the one hand, I wish I'd signed up so that I could jump in there. It was kind of exciting.

On the other, I was already exhausted, cramped, and uncomfortable after the long car ride and hours of waiting around with nowhere to sit. Left at 10am and didn't get home until midnight. The next event is even further away. Think I'll skip it. I don't want to get up at 4am for the trip to Boston.

It was also my first super-spreader event since the pandemic started. It was hot an humid from all the people packed into much too small a space. They were way overbooked, and no one was masked or anything. Masking would have been sorely inadequate anyhow. There was even a kids' division. 

I estimate a roughly zero percent chance that the air was not chock full of covid. This is what I'm talking about, when I say we need to be able to count on our immune systems. Events like that are going on regularly now, and we can either avoid them entirely, or just do what we can to make sure we can handle it. There were probably even anti-vaxxers there, but the only lives they're risking are their own. We were all exposed to covid just the same.

Hopefully I've already had covid two or three times by now, and my immunity is strong, but I guess we'll see.

update, 5 days later: mild sore throat, fever of 101 😒

planning ahead

This month has been tough. Not as tough as for the people getting bombed in Ukraine, but it's depressing to keep wading into the news about it. I've completely given up giving a fuck about electoral politics, but geopolitical controversy can still get its teeth into me, apparently.

Least, think that's why I've been depressed, but who the hell knows. I'm constantly falling back into depression for one reason or another. I've been getting to the gym less regularly, since getting sick a few weeks ago. 

Didn't get to the gym yesterday, didn't think I'd make it today, but somehow managed to get it together at the last minute, and wow, I did really well. Got some nice takedowns and submissions. Executed a perfect no-gi seoi nage on someone way bigger than me, and then got him with a kimura. For once, tapped other people out more times than I had to tap out.

I'd planned on competing at a BJJ event in New Hampshire tomorrow, but getting sick derailed those plans. Easily derailed, because I'm pretty reluctant. It's something that I need to do. I need to be able to say I've done it. It's the safest place to start, before moving on to anything more exciting. I didn't register in time, but tagging along to spectate instead. Maybe that will help me feel more confident about giving it a shot next time. April 16th I'm told. Oh crap, that's soon.

Now I'm home again and not sure what to do with myself. Guess I'll go back to reading about the collapse of western civilization. Sure, it sounds kinda cool, but to be honest, it's going to be really miserable. A slow painful process most won't live to see the end of. As we lurch from each catastrophe to the next, everything else is still getting worse in the background, from wealth inequality and authoritarianism, to climate change.

Now we've got this war, where the US crossed a red line that people across the political spectrum, left, right, and center, have been calling a red line we really shouldn't cross. Biden himself said it 30 years ago. Corporate media stenographers are scrambling to muddy the waters of history, but the real decision makers in our government knew their actions would strongly provoke Russia to invade Ukraine. I'd assumed they'd overestimated their ability to bully every other country in the world, but what if they'd actually planned all of this?

This has been in the works for years, maybe decades, whatever they're up to. The color revolution in 2004, then Maidan in 2014. Arming and training militants the entire time, funding far right political groups, organizations, and propaganda.

Maybe they wanted Russia to do this. They clearly want to drag the war out as long as they possibly can, no matter how many Ukrainians have to die. They've admitted that the goal is to bleed Russia. Maybe that was the plan. One way or another, I suspect their real intent is to cripple Russia, so that they can do what they've done to so many other countries. Regime change, chaos, war.

Do you think Putin is really that bad? How much do you know of where Russia was twenty years ago vs where they are now? And stop with the evil dictator nonsense. It's a country of over a 150 million people, many of which view Putin favorably and his actions in Ukraine necessary. 

How much death and destruction this time? Orders of magnitude more than what's going on now. If any country is the new Nazi Empire, it's the USA, and we need to be stopped. I'm hoping from the far east to the global south, they realize it.

They may not need to attack us militarily. We've overextended ourselves with these sanctions. We're more vulnerable. Maybe they could do it economically. De-dollarize the global economy, sell our debt. Watch us collapse under our own morbid weight. One way or another, the US has become an existential threat to the entire world.

Not that I really have any hope. I'm pretty sure everything will play out even worse than I could have predicted.