i just

give up

—

i’m a fool to do it all over again, yet here it is, happening all over again. how many times in my life do i have to do such things before i learn? 10? 100?

the time for ideallism — is over.

—

worst wishes to all those who aren’t standing up for me; i have no need of such “help.”

everyone else has spent a lifetime taking care of themselves. it is high time that i do the same.

—

modernity: i join you now.

*** WHAT HE SAID *** <<-- click!
A close second is Fisk (emphasis mine):

” Iran now has a clerical government again. So, to all intents and purposes, does Iraq (which was not supposed to end up with a democratically elected clerical administration, but that’s what happens when you topple dictators). In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood won 20 per cent of the seats in the recent parliamentary elections. Now we have Hamas in charge of “Palestine”. There’s a message here, isn’t there? That America’s policies–“regime change” in the Middle East–are not achieving their ends. These millions of voters were preferring Islam to the corrupt regimes which we imposed on them.“

Also check out this piece, which may help to explain to a lot of confused people just why Saddam’s toppling was such a stupid idea — in doing it, we removed the one stable, secular component of the entire region.

It’s tough to have anything other than local (to your immediate area, i.e. workplace, apartment, etc.) friends or indeed relationships in modernity. That’s nothing new, it’s always been that way, we just seem these days to have the expectation (thanks to cell phones, email, etc.) that long-distance is a great idea.

It isn’t. Comparing the hours-of-every-day, every-day-this-week friendships of locality with remote friendships shows just how deep the imbalance is. The odd phone call, which disrupts all activity, or the odd email, which requires that one sit down and type a response, is not up to the task.

Everyone wants to be friends regardless of distance, but they don’t want you to only call them when you’re struggling in life — this tends to make feel put upon. They also don’t want you to avoid making contact for prolonged periods — even if for a very long time you’re doing nothing but struggling and would thus have little to contribute to conversation other than details about, or perspectives that proceed from, the aforementioned struggle. And finally, they also get upset if you are contrived or not completely genuine — especially if they know you’re struggling.

These things do not go together in remote relationships that are constrained by time. When people are together physically, at home or at the workplace, the struggle becomes an artifact of the environment, not a centerpiece for communication, and personalities and preferences can continue to shine through sheer force of time spent together. Not so with communication “episodes” as necessitated by modern communication, in which dialogue must be prioritized according to the third rule above.

So if you’re having a tough stretch:

– Call and be sad and you’ll hear “You only call me when you’re sad!”
– Don’t call because you’re mostly sad and you’ll hear “You never call me!”
– Call and play happy and you’ll hear “You’re not being real with me!”

And in the end you’ll always hear (and probably think about others as well):

“Why don’t you just cheer the f*ck up? You never call me and when you do, you’re either sad or you’re preoccupied and just pretending to listen and either way you’re a rotten conversationalist. I’m tired of being friends with you.”

Add to this the complexity of trying to actually time things so that you can both take a moment for a phone call (or are in a position to place or receive one) at the same time or place, and add to it your bills, your living arrangements, you job, and everything else that’s stressing you out to worry about. Ultimately you’ll bitch about the general brokenness of the arrangement to those people who are actually sitting beside you without giving it a second thought, and they’ll listen without giving it a second thought, because you’re both there already anyway as you each grapple with your own lives, and conversation of any kind is better than silence when face-to-face.

It occurs to me that I haven’t really made any progress in my life at all for a number of years now. I have more degrees than I did before, yes, and I’ve seen more of the country and of the world, and I’ve done a few more things, but I’m not actually any closer to doing anything that I want to do, and at a time when I’ve got the smallest social network I’ve ever had. I suppose moving all over the place all the time and having no money to spend on entertainment will do that to a person.

—

My mind moves too quickly anymore; I can see an entire logical argument through from beginning to end in just a few moments, but there are too many things in the thread to articulate, and if I try to slow things down and take the cognitive branches necessary to enunciate every component of the argument, I lose the logical thread.

So instead, I wind up making simplistic statements that (one hopes) have a deeper intuitive foundation, such as: The best reason never to kill yourself is to spite all of those people who complain about those who kill themselves. I’m starting to really hate judgmental people who call everyone else whiny or who try to analyze-from-a-distance everyone else’s problems while they have so many of their own that nobody can count them.

—

It’s a tough week or two. It’s a tough month. I still have to call a few friends and tell them that actually I haven’t made it out of Salt Lake City and likely won’t until fall. It’s eleven in the morning and I’m not employed and I have bills and laundry, but all I want to do is curl up into a ball and drink.

That or overthrow the government and despotically have hundreds of thousands of people executed just for fun.

My internal censor still works, that sentence was originally much more provocative. I suppose that means that I’m still sane, or at least that I’m still onboard with the social contract — enough to not be an obvious risk yet.

Everything old is new again. Same old drag, brand new place. I am tired. Not since 2003 have I had an ongoing, long-term since of well-being, that lack of anything to serious worry about of which happiness is really composed. I miss it.