I read a Tweet yesterday by someone I don't respect – they're a lazy thinker; I've read their work, it's contrived and boring and useless; and really, I've I'm calling your work contrived, your work is contrived. I bring it up not to criticize them (that's why I'm keeping them anonymous) but for two competing reasons – reason which each want to be the first I articulate, thus crowding my mind.
The first is to prove that even people whom I don't respect have something to teach me and should thus be listened to – if immediately dismissed as lazy thinking, boring, useless, and contrived – for what wisdom they may accidentally impart. Because everyone has something to teach me. Otherwise I would just completely socially isolate and everything would be so much better for me.
I'd actually go on that hermitage I've been promising myself since I was thirteen.
The other thing I wanted to say, before I go off on a tangent about how I make promises to myself I don't plan to keep, but have never made a promise I couldn't to someone else, is what the Tweet was. They were trying to be funny about yesterday's Facebook, et al, blackout. They said something to the effect of writing a Tweet is like sending a test into the ether, and sometimes the ether texts back, and sometimes that's good.
I've been thinking about that a lot, lately. They aren't wrong. See, everyone does have something to teach us. I don't know that they're right – because Twitter personalities with followers know how to manipulate the Ether to get responses and Likes – sort of like how good YouTubers are skilled at generating likes and viewer comments. But they're right enough – especially if one isn't trying to be a Twitter personality.
Or is one?
Am I?
I don't know. I hate the idea. But I need stimulation, and I can't always give it to myself. Mental masturbation loses its fun, for sure.
I have two songs competing in my head for airspace. Ozzy's “I Don't Want to Stop” and Green Day's “Longview”
If I were really clever, I'd do one of those mashups, and it would probably work. But, whatever. The inside of my skull is a cacophony of these verses:
“Why don't they ever listen to me? / It's just a one-way conversation / Nothing they say is gonna set me free / Don't need no mental masturbation”
and
“I sit around and watch the phone / But no one's calling. / Call me pathetic, call me what you will / My mother says to get a job, but she don't like the one she's got. / When masturbation's lost its fun, you're fuckin' lazy.”
It's not pleasant. It is amusing.
Anyway, that Tweet's been in my head, since. Largely I've been chewing on it like a dog with a bone to try to prove them wrong – because I don't respect them, and thus I want to test my wit against theirs to prove to myself that I am fit to have any opinion about them, whatever. It's this whole thing I do. I've told you repeatedly – my father taught me to be arrogant. And disagreeing with people we don't like simply because we don't like them is as human a behavior as there is.
Jordan Peterson deals with it every day. Maybe every waking minute of every day. People hate that guy because he says things they don't like to hear. How many people make decisions with their life based on their love or loathing for the President of the United States? Or think about how people who will never meet them defend their favorite celebrities, both online, but also in public.
Identity – that's what that is.
But I don't want to talk about identity.
I don't know what I want to talk about, actually. I just know I want to talk. It's been a few days – maybe several days, at this point – since I've sat down to do a Producer's Log. Rob and I – mostly I – went through this last Episode, The Rod of Wadjet faster than I was emotionally prepared for, I guess.
Usually when I write something like that – when I'm involved in something with as much of an impact on me as that – I see it – or the next thing – in the world around me. Let me explain. Because I know what Confirmation Bias is. ("Confirmation bias cannot be eliminated entirely, but it can be managed, for example, by education and training in critical thinking skills." lol, I found that an amusing addendum - because that would have been how I would argue accusations of Confirmation bias in my behavior: my training in self-evaluation and critical thinking skills - it's like the Universe wanted to remind me that I do it too and I know it and I try to be careful - remember?)
*Ahem* Why was I whispering for so long?
I try to consume a lot of information. I once had an absurd conversation where I was talking with someone about how I prefer to spend my downtime learning rather than vegging out. They were offended because they liked vegging out. That's fine. Apparently how I spend my time made them feel bad about themselves, so I needed to feel bad for it.
Still feel bad for it. I'm still reticent to share that I'd rather listen to a Great Courses lecture or watch a documentary about alternate history or conspiracy theories than Friends or The Office or some other. I have watched The Office – many times. I have not watched Friends.
The point is kind of that even when I do afford myself vegetable time, the next step in the path toward finishing this thing, this Lesvos Serpent, makes itself pretty obvious in the material I'm consuming. I've gotten almost used to following those waysigns, if you like. Now that I'm not seeing them, I'm as lost and confused as I've felt for a long time.
And for good reason.
It's football season, and I have other things I'm thinking about besides Rob – and my consumption time has been spent on the NFL, not so much on avenues that might lead me to think about the Middle Ages, religion, spirituality, magick.
...But, for as true as that statement seems, it's equally untrue. Another pokeball of indecision. What's on the inside? I don't know, and I'll never know, until like Justin Fields with an open window, I just throw it. That was more for me than it was for you, but I'm glad if you enjoyed it.
I needed to write these things because I needed to read them. I have needed to hear myself actually admitting that I'm avoiding Rob. I'm afraid of what comes next. Of course I know what comes next in the story, but after that...? More than admitting it, I've needed to come up with a plan of action I can actually stick to. Some might tell me to just focus on the NFL blog. Just write about football until you're noticed, then branch out. But I want so much more than that.
So what I need to do is commit to at least composing one of these PLogs every day. And I need to be less concerned with the word count limitation, I think. Not that I'm getting frustrated with it – I am undecided whether I'm saying enough to keep you wanting to come back. I tell myself that I'll come back to the topic tomorrow, or later, and that I'm leaving you breadcrumbs to follow me.
And it is a Log.
I did conceive it as kind of Kirk's Captain's Log.
Before you get excited, I've seen more of Star Trek TOS in Ace Ventura than the actual show. When I think, “Captain's Log, Star date...” I'm seeing Jim Carrey in an ugly Hawaiian shirt, acting like an asshole in a dolphin tank.
The point is I'm not sure I'm leaving enough breadcrumbs to be followed or whether I'm being incoherent and divisive or whether I'm just being insecure.
It's probably the lattest.
As I'm thinking of what more to say now that I've committed myself to trying to say more – and finding it difficult, what with having crossed my previous three-quarter mark – I realize that I'm in one of those moments where Rob's story is paralleling my life again. Like he's not talking to you all, but talking specifically to me. I don't like it when this happens.
No one especially enjoys being shown where they're going wrong and how easy it should be to fix it. I know that more than anyone. I am as irascible and resistant to criticism as anyone. I was raised to be arrogant and resentful in my arrogance. I keep saying that, today, but it's true. I need to be reminded that humility does not come naturally, and no matter how hard we practice at something we can still fail miserably – no matter how good we have been in the past.
You might be wondering about why I of all people have a football blog in the first place – and why I don't have different Twitter identities for them. I do. I just don't use @vsrabbithole because I lost the password and am really just too lazy to do anything about it. That Twitter handle is also from a time in my life I keep returning to in these posts: The End of my Old Life. So maybe I just don't want to remember that I was also that persona for a while.
Because we all have personas.
Isn't that what the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona games are all about? I don't know, I only played P5. But that's what I took away from them.
I've worn a lot of masks in my life. Sometime during high school I decided to stop pretending to be someone other than who I was for likes. This is before Social Media, but I know you know what I mean. And I lived that way for nearly twenty years. Not exactly happily, but shamelessly.
Then I moved back to Ohio. And the shame started.
But maybe what really started was I began to wear the mask of Writer, Auteur, and Artist.
I think I'm going to wind this one up. I'm losing steam. Which is an interesting thing to admit when you're freely associating. It shouldn't be difficult to associate freely.
The most difficult thing in life is being true to oneself.
Dr. Peterson talks about it when he says to say only what we believe in the moment to be true – something I've done since high school, long before I ever heard his voice. For the record. A UFO podcaster whose show I don't listen to, but whom I follow on Twitter-- (If you have to ask, just scroll back to the top and start the post over, I'm tired, remember?) He says mostly things I disagree with or find uninteresting, but then sometimes he'll talk about his personal emotional or mental state.
That's what I'm really reading for.
I'm looking for human connection. I don't care about selling this piece or my football blog.
Allow me to explain that sentence.
The word care in English comes from care in proto-German, which means a lamentation or to lament. A lamentation is the passionate expression of grief or sorrow. From Latin, lamenta, wailing or weeping.
What I care about, what I lament, what I would wail and weep to find is stimulating discourse. Connection. Another genuine person who lives and thinks and acts genuinely.
People, in other words, who don their masks when they need to, and who recognize another like them.
These things are a me problem.
Anyway, he was talking about his mental health, and he said he describes his depression as feeling mentally tired. That's how I feel right now. Mentally tired. Like the strain of holding back my own consciousness so I can hear Rob and listen to the Universe is just too much for me to bear right now. Like focusing on these PLogs is too much effort to ask of my leisure time.
Leisure time is an interesting choice of words. As you know, because you've read everything Rob's said, the word leisure is loaded. One of the meanings of the Greek word scholē – English school – is leisure. The others are philosophy and lecture place.
Fuck it, I'm doing it.
For a long time, the only people in the world who had leisure time at all were the uber rich. Those landowning noble men and women who effectively owned everything in Attic Greece. It has been handed down to us that the highest pursuit of Athens nobility was of philosophy – that is, the love of wisdom: learning. Historians of philosophy will paint for you a picture like Raphael's The School of Athens—
They will make it seem as though the Greek nobles were all Ciceros in their own rights. (I know I'm being anachronistic, here. Work with me.) But since someone had to write about it, and because we still have the libelous idiom Platonic Relationship because of the slanderous rumors that Plato would take young boys and girls off from the Lyceum to talk to them instead of fucking them, we know that these were the exceptions and not the rules of the day.
So we know that it was not common practice for nobility to lounge around their gardens and academies and actually have stimulating conversation about the natures of Being and of the Universe, but instead they were mostly having idle sex. And good for them. When you're rich, that's all you're good for: propagating the specie. Usually that specie is wealth.
Choke on my disdain.
But where was I?
Ah, yes, I was propping myself up to you that I enjoy my leisure time as school, not as idle-atry. Two great big pats on the back for this guy, right? Oh, wait, I was describing depression and justifying how my depression makes it too difficult to work on Rob, implying that it's up to you to buoy my spirits so I can fight through, knowing I have an audience who likes what I have to say.
But if that's why I'm writing, I'm failing us all – me, Robert, and especially you, friend and reader.
So I needed to do this.
That's also not why I brought it up. I brought it up because even the most impoverished American - and probably person in the industrialized world - is richer and has more opportunity available to them than any but kings and the most nobly born at any other moment in history. We are on the brink of a major revolution against these very same noble assholes I'm talking about - and rather than learn from the best of them and overcome their foibles, they have taught us to imitate them in the myth of their sloth and vanity, greed and lust for the pleasures of the flesh.
It is a myth because while it is true, it is only true of the least-great of them. The greatest of them are remembered as the exception. But it was the Great among them who made the entire society both exceptional and indulgent.
And it is inarguable that the United States - and, again, the rest of the Industrialized world by extension - is an entirely Consumer-based economy. If I want you to ultimately donate so that I can generate revenue from this, I have to make it worth consuming to you, right? We take our very identities from what we consume - how we spend our money.
It's gross.
But I don't want to talk about Identity.
It's amazing how confronting fear, looking at its source, naming it, and calling it by name can affect the psyche. It's almost like there is a function for Confessional and Exorcism. Didn't I write about The Exorcism and Mental Health and the role of the shaman in each in another post? Yes. Yes, I did.
And Robert and The Tavernmaster have a talk about Confession.
(“Yeah,” he said. “I guess I do. The Church.... Confession is important for people. The Buddhists figured it out some 2000 years ago or more - that people just want to share their perspective with other people. The Church asks their priests to be this person, but they get it all wrong.”)
I feel more empowered now. Maybe I make a cup of coffee and give Rob a call.
Thanks for being here, if you made it this far. I hope my struggles can in some way help you through yours – or open your eyes to another way of seeing the world. I'm basically done, I just want to tell one more anecdote – in case she's reading.
The vastest majority of my social experience has been online. From the time I was a pre-teen talking on (oh, gosh, what was that AIM alternative everyone used to use? It had the uh-oh! When you got a message)... to more recently, using Reddit and Snapchat – and yeah, Twitter – to try to find... gods, I resist saying friendship. I don't know that I'm looking for friendship. I just call it stimulation – because I don't expect anyone to ever consider me a friend, and I don't know that I have a functional definition of what it means to be my friend.
Regardless.
I made a friend before last year. We lived and continue to live very different lives.
I don't want to change anyone. Everyone says they want to change. Or they want their lives to be different.
So we talked about perspective and about the nature of reality. We mostly argued. And she would get really frustrated with me. And I wasn't in a place where I could be the kind of friend she needed emotionally as far as coming back every day. But I've been thinking about her a lot. She's basically the only Platonic friend I've ever had.
So I reached out to her a week or so ago. And she has changed.
You can notice a lot about people if you're paying attention. Especially in text. Words do actually matter, and phrasing, whether people want to admit it or not. Though usually those people are using the wrong words when they speak, phrasing them poorly, and refusing to adapt to criticism.
I recognized a lot of words she would get upset with me for saying appearing in her lexicon. It made me happy – not because I had changed her, but because she'd picked up some of the lint of my life, and she was happier – whether for it I don't know. But with it, for sure.
Maybe that's why I'm doing this. I can't change who you are. I don't want to. That's up to you – whether you actually care enough to do something about what you are complaining about. I know I often don't, actually. I'll usually say that I wish I were writing more, then pick up the controller for my Switch and tell myself that channel-surfing YouTube is the same as an EVP session with the Universe.
It's not. And it never will be.
So we're going to do this more often. And my goal is to make them as long as this one, whether I drill down on a topic or kind of float around the surface of my mind for four pages of text. The EVP, if there is one, is in the text, in the subtext and the metatext – not in seeking scholē.
Again – thanks for being here. I'll talk at you tomorrow. And I think I know about what. I've had a topic sitting in an empty document for a week. I think I'm ready to get at it. Until then.
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