I can’t stop pacing.

Or posting.

I need to be working.

Really I think that the spread of blogging is a tacit admission of American social impotence and a hostile social world. Why do I blog? I blog because nobody else will listen without judging, because I don’t have enough social contacts (or understanding enough social contacts) to fulfill my need as a human being to communicate and express myself. I suspect that the entire American subculture of blogging is the same. Our blogs become our greatest friends because they have time for us, aren’t hurt when we express a position or an emotion that contradicts their own, they don’t use what we say against us, and they’re simply easier to get along with than most people in this nation.

I started blogging in 1999 because I was lonely and I felt like maybe if nobody else anywhere loved me, the Web would love me. Years later, the Web continues to love me, while people have by and larged mocked me or called me a whiner for saying that the Web loves me. Ironic. Or, I suppose (choosing a better word), illustrative.

As an example, right now, today, and yesterday, too, I feel the incredible need to communicate. I’m lonely, and I’m down and I want company. Only I don’t feel the urge to call any person in particular. Too big a chance for rejection—maybe they don’t agree with what I have to say, or maybe they’re distracted and make my emotional state seem unimportant, maybe the familiarity or parity are missing or strained so that the call is horribly awkward and troubling, or maybe they’re just not there or too busy to talk to me. Any of these might be devastating just now.

The web, on the other hand, is there for me almost perfectly. It never turns me down. It’s never distracted when I’m typing into this box—its entire attention is on me and me alone. It’s so attentive it checks my words for spelling mistakes so that I don’t embarrass myself. And it never misunderstands what I say. In fact, it understands so well that it expresses back to me what I have just said using my very own words, and sees them as so important that they are to be published immediately for all to read!

It is better validation than any mere human can provide.

It sounds very much as though I’m saying in almost so many words that I like computers better than people. In a way, that is what I’m saying. I suspect they like me better than people, too. And I further suspect that many Americans are in the same boat. What it means I don’t know, but it suggest that a certain level of worry might be in order.

In any case, whatever else has been the point of this nonsense, the blog is always here for me. The people on the other hand have seemed to come and go. Such a state of affairs is sad. It also encourages increased dependence on the blog as my confidant. 🙁

So there is now an obvious pattern in my life. I dream when I’m under emotional duress. When I’m not, I don’t, at least not in ways that I can remember. I don’t seem to ever have nice dreams. Ever. If I dream, I dream in ways that make me sick to my stomach when I wake up.

http://www.alternet.org/sex/37642/?comments=layout#comments

Not so much the story, but the comments. Sound familiar? Jesus, what’s wrong with our generation? After hours reading all the shite back and forth and unable to take my eyes off of this train wreck, this is my favorite part, by YHWH way down on the page:

“What he have here is a fundamental inability to look at things from another person’s perspective.”

And I can’t help but think, as I read it… **Yeah. Welcome to America.** Sometimes for days on end I have nothing but that sinking feeling (and the experiences that bear out) that nobody can see it from anyone else’s perspective in this culture, ever.

It’s not just that our generation can’t have healthy relationships (as every one of my friends can attest to). It is broader than that. It is that we’re not nice people in any way at all. We’re all living in perpetual Seinfeld episodes. We’re raised in a jingoistic, repressive, racist, anti-intellectual society and are then constantly manipulated by a capitalist system that makes its biggest profits when it can use advertising and pervasive public communication and lobbied legislation to make us feel insecure or afraid (even, sometimes, of each other and ourselves) so that they can sell us all the cock pills, the fake boobs, the fast cars, the anti-aging cream—the “cure” to fix what we’ve been made to believe sucks about us, or the “status” that we’ve been made to believe we need in order to avoid being made irrelevant and unloved by the power-lunch super-model competitors they’ve assured us we have.

But in the midst of this, the deeper subtext is that this upbringing and this system have caused us to grow a kind of aggressive defensiveness, an internal nuclear button that we press all the time and that sends out waves of radiation in all directions, most particularly at whomever is disappointing us at the moment—and we are always preemptively disappointed because we know in advance (we feel like we’ve been told on pretty good authority, though we can’t put a finger on just by whom) that we’re gonna get let down, insulted, abused, threatened, made to feel small. Americans are assholes because only if you are entirely self-absorbed and amoral can you survive and not be raped by our culture and our economy full of similarly self-absorbed, amoral people acting preemptively to, take you for all you’re worth, scam you, slam you, destroy you, unemploy you, break you down and fuck you around, because they’re afraid you’re gonna do it to them first.

This country and this system try to break people. To survive, we turn into psychopaths. We turn on each other and the world. And in the meantime, we’re all lonely, we all cry continuously, we all drink ourselves into early deaths.

—

I feel sorry for all of us. We’re unhappy. We’re lonely. We suck. And we’re killing everyone else, too.

Hooray for the USA, the free market, and the classical democratic liberalism that got us here!