Producer's Log 25: You Know How These Things Go: I pick a topic and then don't talk about it for four manuscript pages

 

People say so often that the Good life is also the Easy life. Even thinkers whom I respect-bordering-on-love will say this – that the Good life is the easier life, that righteousness is not difficult, that living on principle is simple. I mean, Jordan Peterson even implies as much.

And they are wrong.

There is an idiom in our English language that means a person who doesn't exist; it's also used to describe the leader of a gang of thieves; but its original meaning is a person of high morals and standards of action and thought: An Upright Man.

There are many reasons for this, none least of which that the Good or Upright life is actually the most difficult of all lives. Because standing with your back straight and your head high, living uprightly, forthrightly, and righteously are how the world is able to target and tear away from you your head.

See, people say that living Well, that being Good, are easy because they assume they are doing those things every day. Just like we all assume that we're the Good Guy in the movies of our lives, the main hero, at any rate – the most interesting character, for sure— In addition to viewing ourselves as the narrators of our stories, we also assume that we're the best we can be. That, in fact not just intention, we are and do Good. That because we want to do and be Good, we in fact are.

Because we assume (wrongly) that our default state is Good, we assume that being Good is easy and that any description of the difficulty of being good – the admission, for instance, that life is suffering and that said suffering will make us take the paths of least resistance in our lives (something I know way too much about) – is evil and critical of the choice to be good. Because when we hear that Goodness is difficult, that it is in fact work to be Good, and work is by definition difficult (at some point it will get tedious to do the same effort time after time again), we hear that it isn't worth doing.

Because we are taught in our lives than anything worth doing is the easy thing.

We are told that anything worth doing is the difficult thing. Teachers and day care attendants and coaches and managers and people responsible in general for the development of young people into adults will tell you: work is worth it because work makes us better; difficult work makes us better in proportion to the difficulty. But what we learn from observing those very same people is that difficult things are difficult – and best to be avoided at all costs.

So from our very infancy we build within ourselves this cognitive dissonance – these concurrently chiming, discordant bells in our brains, ringing out an antithetical chord: I have to work to be good, but being good comes naturally to me.

I'm inclined to notice this pattern – a pattern which makes up most of the American psyche – because it's the same pattern that “academically gifted” children (i.e. child prodigies) show in their development: Because school is easy for them, they (we) never learn how to overcome adversity; so usually at the first sign thereof we crumble to absolute pieces. Literally just google the phrase gifted children, and you'll get results like this: https://www.bustle.com/p/how-being-a-gifted-kid-affects-you-as-adult-32168 an infinite supply of people like me blogging or writing editorials about how being “super smart” is actually really difficult in this world.

And because of that, I used to think, Well, since I'm “super smart” and I show all these signs of difficulty, it's the world that betrayed me – not I it, and that used to be enough for me.

It was enough for me to say that because I am so smart, anything that doesn't come naturally to me is something I don't need to learn how to do properly – obviously if I'm not already good at it I haven't needed it 'til now.

Which is funny because it's obviously and patently not true. It should have been obvious ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Okay, fine, not when I was four. It should have been obvious to me that my inability to practice was a problem.

I mean, let's be real – it was.

I brought my trumpet home from school every day between fourth grade and high school, when they gave us a cubby hole for our instruments. One is the number of times I played it at home. I tried it once and didn't like how I sounded or that my family could hear me – and I knew that my mother was going to have something hurtful and mean to snipe at me – so I would just bring it home, put it down, and pick it back up again on the way to school the next day.

That's how I treated homework assignments, too. I knew I wasn't going to get any help with my family for projects – so I just wouldn't do them. No point agonizing over a Science Fair Project your father isn't going to bother helping you with until the day after it's due. Speaking of my father.... I'll talk about my living situation and my decisions with my life, later. They tie in with all of this.

So, I'm sure I've talked about how university didn't work out for me. It wasn't going to. Not only because my personality just doesn't gel with the University environment, but because I wasn't capable of working on two insurmountable obstacles at once. Maybe I was. I shouldn't talk about my capabilities like there is a limit to them.

One thing my father used to say to me when I was a boy, and which started this whole poisoned mindset that I have, is that I can do anything I put my mind to. So I just don't put my mind to things and I can tell myself, Well, it didn't interest me enough for me to bend all the effort of my mind to it, and that's enough for me to explain away my failures.

It was enough for me to explain away my failures.

It has been enough.

I am wary of anyone making resolutions. Not just because I have watched my parents immediately backslide on every resolution they have ever made where I can see; but because it's a trope that humans can't follow through and make good on sweeping changes to their behavior – changes in behavior which lead to changes in lifestyle and worldview.

Because as I've said, we don't actually want to change. Each of us believes somewhere inside us that a priori we are Good and that we do no not need to change. This is how I, as an addict of many things, can convince myself that my addiction is actually like medication – really, I'm treating the symptoms of my life with the whatever. It's making me better!

That's an interesting paragraph to read back, because I don't know how much I believe it.

Was my life dramatically better before I started consuming THC? Let's be honest with ourselves – was I happier? Was I better? No. I lived for seven years in an unfulfilling marriage with a woman I was only with because she was in my proximity and I thought that's how life works – you make the best of what's in your proximity.

I've documented it a little, but – yes, after I allowed habitual cannabis use to dominate (because it dominates) my life, it looks like everything has fallen into chaos. And, yes, I no doubt look like any addict, any alcoholic or coke fiend or whatever. Because the key point of the definition of addiction is the factor that the substance or the behavior has to in some way negatively impact your life. You have to make choices for the drug – for the whatever – which force you to sacrifice standard practices of good living.

Your life becomes about feeding the addiction.

My life is about feeding my confirmation biases that really I am a good person and all my effort really does matter.

That's why I write when I don't want to write – which is a paradox I'll have to articulate sometime. I finally figured out what it means to me when I say “I just want to write,” and today is an experiment at trying to establish some sort of a ritual toward that definition of what it means to “want to write” rather than the definition which is foist on me by my peers and potential audience – which is especially thrust on me by other writers.

But I don't much care about other writers.

I want to engage with other writers, other creatives, to learn from them.... But at the same time, I have no interest in academically trained writers and creatives.

If I have an audience, I imagine that it will change over the years, like my favorite bands. The people who are likely to hear my early work and appreciate it for the message I'm trying to get out of it are likely to be people like who I was: young people, probably males, angry at and overwhelmed with the world. If there's an audience for Robert as he is through The Lesvos Serpent as it is, it's those people.

But that anger, that dissatisfaction that Robert feels through the first Act, which I feel and understand all too well from my 15 years in near-desperate poverty, that's not the message.

Which—

I'm changing topics again, but it's all connected.

I haven't been writing. And what I have written is not good. Probably oversharing, since I've managed to find some manner of equilibrium in my life – even if it's not the sort that anyone would recommend for me. I've chosen to stay here. I evaluated my options, and I've decided that for the sake of my cats, but also for myself that this is the better situation for me to be in. Returning to my father's home... is the deadest of all dead ends.

It is fortunate, I think, that this week has played out how it has – how I knew that it would, in my heart. Maybe it's for the best. Maybe it's not. But I have learned some things.

Things like my tendency to fight anything just to fight it because I need to fight isn't helping me in my life.

Writing to write because I need to write isn't helping me.

Lashing out at ghosts and phantoms and people whom I don't know like I'm going to change their opinions or I'm expressing mine... it isn't helping me.

Not writing to spite myself and spite my fate and spite her and spite my father.... Those things aren't helping, either.

But writing because I want a reason to stay sober, or writing because I desperately need to sort through all these dissonant obsessive thoughts in my brain.... That's something I can get behind.

Because it's important to me that I continue to think of this, the writing, the doing, as for me. It's important that I not focus on writing to be read. Because I've read authors, Twitter handles, which write to be read – and it is they who are the frauds.

I was called a fraud today.

It feels good, actually. It should feel bad – every author is afraid of being called a fraud. Not just afraid. Terrified. Now that I've joined #WriterTwitter (or whatever), I notice that so many authors sit around stewing about whether they are fraudulent. Which is funny – because it seems to me that those may very well be the ones who are. But that's not nice. That's just my own false sense of superiority creeping over my brain like the shadow of that demon-thing in Fantasia over that graveyard. [img]

Fake it til you make it is an aphorism for a reason.

But we are – fraudulent – to a certain degree. Anyone who would step in front of the crowd and say to them, “I have accurately recreated life. Come – pay – listen – enjoy,” deserves to be told that they are fraudulent as much as they deserve to be paid for their effort. But that's another story, isn't it?

Sort of.

Because writers, we have this idea that because we sat down and took the time to write these words we write and arrange them how we do and spend so much time with our characters and our details and our facts and our little recreations of reality – and let me be very specific here: I'm talking about everyone who works in words; not just fiction, not just poetry; I'm talking every television and movie writer, ever non-fiction writer, every poet – Hell, everyone who casually fires off a Tweet that claims to represent reality— We have this idea that because we worked so hard we deserve compensation.

But the only thing any human being deserves is to die.

Life owes you and me nothing but suffering. And we owe one another exactly nothing.

No one is entitled to publish or to an audience. I read a lot of published writers trying to be supportive of unpublished writers by pandering to them that there are just too many submissions, too many options, for anyone to really have any control over how well their book sells – or whether it is even read by a publisher at all. I think it's all kind of pathetic. But I am not accustomed to being coddled, to being supported at all. So I would think that, wouldn't I?

Because that's what we do. Whether it's right or not.

I've strayed so far.

We don't want to hear that things are difficult. We don't want to know how our brethren are struggling.

The two conflicts I've had in my life which brought me here were over me saying that living on principle is not a blessing – it is a curse. A simple-minded person said that living on principle, as in Rightly, is a blessing.

A blessing is defined as: “God's favor and protection; a prayer asking for God's prayer and protection; Grace said before or after a meal.”

That word, Grace. It's an interesting word we don't discuss enough – that is, we don't discuss it enough in our private lives of worship, and we don't discuss it enough in our public lives of practice. What is Grace? Well, it's hard to say. It's a word that means a lot of things, now. But let's go with the original and work out from there: “The free and unmerited favor of God, as bestowed in salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings.”

Ah-ha.

A blessing is something which is freely given. A blessing is an advantage for which you don't have to work. We don't say “God bless me” so that we will have to put in the hard work and the grind and the effort over time; we ask for blessings so that we can magickally skip all of the hard parts. A blessing from God is a job that falls right in your lap. Or the perfect housing istuation to meet your budget that's close to where you work and in a good school district. A blessing is something you don't deserve which makes your life better.

And living rightly is not a fucking blessing. Living Rightly is the most difficult thing you will ever decide to do. Not only is it the most difficult thing, it never gets easier. It only gets more difficult.

Something that unrighteous people don't seem to recognize about themselves is that we have been taught to be skeptical of “righteous” people. For good reason. I've already written much about cults, and more will come – just not right now. I'm starting to run out of my self-imposed space (and I'm really trying to take that limitation seriously).

Basically, as a person trying to live rightly, everyone in my life is constantly trying to find the lie to my behavior.

They're constantly challenging me on everything I say. Like my words don't match up to my behavior. Because when people talk the way I talk, their behavior almost never actually matches their words. And, especially college educated people, love finding someone in a logical fallacy – in cognitive dissonance or living anthithetically.

I mean, they're in all they debt; they may as well use their 1000 year outdated education for something.

Even if it's social isolation and ignorance.

You know, what it was designed for.

We used to be hunched animals. We lived below the grass line, keeping our heads where predators couldn't see them. Because we were small and largely unable to defend ourselves.

This may no longer be literally true; but it is a metaphorical fact – a paradox in terms if ever there was one – of the modern age.

You live stooped, with your head below the grass-line of countless aspects of your life. You see the sky – and you know that there is an horizon above that grass-line; but you also know there are predators out there; and, worse, that there are other hunched animals that look like you and usually act like you, but they're bigger and if they catch you looking at their horizon they're going to plant you with the grass seed.

I've described my own feelings of inadequacy. My own experience being squashed by larger “influencers”. I know what it is to be bullied and to be silenced, to be marginalized and made to feel small. So it should be that I should not let these snipers, these birds of prey and thugine bullies, to make me afraid to hold my head high.

I made a promise, and I'm keeping it. It is the difficult thing; it is the apparently worse decision for my life; but it is a promise that I made. And I can't call myself an upright man and break my promises. I cannot call myself one thing and do another – and I cannot delete things about myself which I have said and thought and done simply because they appear to be antithetical to my message and myself.

If I have cognitively come to understand something but do not reflect it in my character, it is incumbent on me first to fix myself – then to fix my neighborhood.

So that's what I'm going to try to do. I'm still going to bitch about how I'm marginalized and about how more people should be reading my work and about how I'm not making any money at this, so why should I modulate or moderate (I'm not sure which word I mean) my behavior or my thoughts to the group's— And I'm not always going to be positive. I'm going to have bad days. I'm going to read things and see things that make me feel hopeless and I am going to respond to them.

I am allowed to feel despondent in my quest toward righteousness without abandoning it entirely.

In fact, if my exploration of the mystical, esoteric, magickal space has taught me anything, it's that the very feeling of despondency means that I'm closer to righteousness than I was when I was numb.

So here's to rededicating myself to something I'd tried to give up. Here's to not making my own success, but finding the people who need to hear me struggle so they can make it through their own struggles.

Because I cannot be the only person who feels the way I do. In fact – I know I'm not.

The responsibility is mine to figure out how to stop feeling this way so I can speak to my crowd instead of piggybacking off taller stoop-shoulders and louder voices.

And I will. Of that you can be sure.

Thanks for checking this one out. It's... not my best. But it's where my head is at. If it's distracted and meandering, it's because my life is distracted and meandering. I'm trying to put a lot of broken pieces back together, and I'm largely doing it alone. So it's going to take time. But time... time is something I feel suddenly like I have a lot of again.

So I'm not so worried about forcing this thing into any hole, let alone one into which it didn't fit.

Because this thing, it's not a piece of a greater whole. You are the piece which fits into it. And that's really cool for me. I hope it's cool for you. Either way, I'll talk at you soon.