I know what is wrong with America. I know. Does that make me a conservative?

Creeping forward. Alone, it would seem. Sometimes I wish everyone everywhere would just go away. Life would be quieter.

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!

God I’m depressed.

I just want to love someone, settle down, have a life, grow old in good company. That’s all I want. Everything else I do is because that never seems to happen. Years and years of living, years and years of women, no closer to having the basic thing that every human wants: a home. Just my own little home, until it’s all over.

Maybe it doesn’t happen for my generation. Maybe we are all doomed.

Women.
AAAGH.

Disaster area. Absolute disaster area. Must fix.

I have managed to maneuver myself into a position in which all of the positive forces in my life—people, places, things, opportunities—have become sources of extreme stress due to their all being in contradiction to one another. Not merely competition (which one can prioritize oneself through) but contradiction, willfully opposed to one another.

What’s the point of having good things in your life if they’re just going to create a sense of loss? What’s the point in friends, opportunities, careers, family, if you have to spend all of your time trying not to lose any of them, knowing that actually you will lose all of them in the end, especially if you feel as though you can’t bear to lose even one of them?

I can’t help but feel as though I’m careening toward disaster. As though there’s a kind of reckoning, or judgment day, that’s been coming in my life since the day that I dropped out of high school in the 10th grade that I keep managing to put off, but which is always just around the corner as I juggle everything precariously knowing that it’s all one slip away from destroying everything I’ve tried to build in my life.

It’s not even a matter of juggling. It’s a matter of sheer will thus far… but the strength of the conflict is reaching an apex at which will cannot be enough. Perhaps a year from now I will have no friends, no girlfriend, no school, no job, no home. Perhaps I will be suicidal then. Perhaps I will just live in a slum somewhere very far away. Perhaps I will be a nonbelieving priest.

Perhaps I will just run and run and scream forever.

—

I don’t know whether I should call this one.
I don’t know whether I should tell that one “no.”
I don’t know whether I should postpone the other one.
I don’t know whether I should quit the other two.
I don’t know whether I should pay this one, or pay that one.
I don’t know whether I should move her for this reason, or there for that.
I don’t know anything. I am going crazy.
All of them must be done. All of them must not be done.
They are all filling my head with sirens and crowd noises and screams of death.

—

Even this blog, which is my only outlet in the world, is one of these contradictory elements. It, like so many other things in my life, is in conflict not just with one or two things, but with almost everything else.

Fell asleep. Strange and troubling dreams. Ugh.

The libertarians have it exactly backward. People should not be free. They must not be free if overall contentment and happiness is to be maximized. There must be no individual; every person must have their lives assigned to them and must be happy with what they’re assigned. The collective must impose its will for the good of the collective, as an aggregate of the all.

People must not be allowed to make their own decisions, set their own goals, or follow their own desires. They must be carefully educated, then forced to think for themselves even as they are forcibly forbidden from acting for themselves. Those that don’t understand why must be removed from social circulation.

To allow individuals to attempt to maximize their own happiness is to ensure that they will do so at the expense of others. It is not a net gain, but a net imbalance within the system that not only increases instability but actually decreases overall aggregate happiness.

The state must run lives.
And in a successful state, no one will want their autonomy.

And who runs the state? What ideology will form the basis for the population’s interaction and existence? I begin to believe that it doesn’t matter, so long as it has an iron hand, a pragmatic judiciousness, unassailable self-consistency, a dominating anti-corruption mechanism, and the ability to ensure that all are seamlessly enculturated to extoll the normalcy and mundanity of the collective lebensgeist.

—

Individualism is the core of all suffering.
Ruthless-yet-benevolent collectivism is our only hope of saving the planet, the species, and our souls.

Political power, barrels of guns, etc.

To eat alone is desolate; to starve together ecstatic.

So let’s look at this thing. Let’s do the male thing and try to find some order in all of this chaos.

I am:

(1) Moving to NYC *if* I can find a place and some more $$$
(2) Doing a Ph.D. for better or for worse, assuming (1)
(3) Jobless here, there, or anywhere
(4) Without current personal contacts at my longtime publisher
(5) Spending a lot of time on low-pay freelance stuff
(6) Too Chinese for everyone, but too white to like to hang out with Chinese
(7) In medium-poor health physically, emotionally, and spiritually
(8) Exhausted
(9) In need of having some dreams again, some real dreams that I can work toward
(0) Possibly alone in all of this, though I hope that’s not the case

When I was an undergrad I used to just like doing stuff. Now all these years later every last thing in life has taken on this bittersweet quality, from hanging out with family to hanging out with friends to being in relationships to just listening to some tunes.

I don’t know. There’s no order here. I have to make order. I just don’t know if it’s that moment yet, though. *sigh* I wish so many things were different right now, I don’t even know where to begin. It’s overwhelming. I walk along and I think about how the whole thing has gotten away from me and how that old cocksure Aron of yore is hiding under a rock these days.

I’ve seen a lot of beaten men in my life. Too many for comfort. I very much don’t want to become one of them. But I also don’t want to become a tyrant. I don’t know—is there middle ground for a man? Do I have to choose between life as a shadow of a man, life as a selfish brute of a man, or life as a tranny? Can anyone just be a regular guy in today’s world and survive?

Am I doing all the wrong things to make that possible? What should I be doing with myself, if all I want is to watch some college ball games, read a few novels, and and maybe write one someday? You can’t have what you want. That’s the deal. Gotta grab that and hold it and own it. I can’t have what I want. To try to have what I want is the way to unhappiness. To want is the way to unhappiness.

I guess I am a Buddhist.

—

The proverb goes: ours is not to determine, but merely to do.

—

Once, I was a brighter star. I enjoyed it then. I feel as though I could have that again, but I don’t feel as though it will make me happy.

—

She kept thinking all the best things I was trying to say were the worst. 🙁 I feel like I hurt her when I was trying to share all the goodness that I want to give her.

—

“Far away, in the highlands of Guatemala, we dreamed of Hapiya. I dreamed that I was reading his obituary in the Gallup Independent, but that it was wrong; it said he was eighty-seven, not seventy-two. On the same night, Dennis dreamed that Hapiya was discussing the text of the story of the Beginning with him, saying that two of the lines were two ways of saying the same thing. Then he awoke with a start, thinking he’d been with a man who was already dead.

“We asked Don Andrés, our Mayan teacher, to help us to understand our dreams. He asked for the date when Hapiya entered the hospital. It was the day Two No’j on the Mayan calendar, and he divined for us by combining the meanings of the calendar days, which he counted out with his bright-red divining seeds and sparkling crystals, with the lighning that raced through his blood.

“‘Come here, Lord Two No’j, Three Tijas, Four Kawuq, Five Junajpu, Six Imöx’—on through the calendar—’Four Kan, Five Kame. Oh, Lord Five Kame, Five Death. Yes, after he came to the hospital he was a little better. But then his condition became more grave. He was in agony. Already he is dead.’

“Don Andrés looked down at his right shin and said, ‘What happened was not a simple sickness, nor was it sent by God or the earth, it was the deed of a man. We humans envy what another possesses, we put our word into the shrines. Yes, some neighbor or friend is to blame.’

“‘Don Andrés, we know who it was, a neighbor who tried to kill his sheep.’

“Glancing toward his right armpit, he said, ‘The one who envied him is imprisoned, he does not walk on this earth, he died even before Hapiya did, but his deed remained.’

“Then he pointed behind his right knee. ‘Yes, it is so, my lightning speaks.'”

Sometimes in life you feel really, really, really alone. I thought it was a tough year already, but this just sucks. I’ve been trying to be with her all along, and I’ve wanted to be with her all along, but somehow I can’t find my way.

My life sucks. It’s falling apart. Everything I’ve worked on all these years is evaporating in 2006. Truly a year that will go down in infamy.

We’re not together. She thinks it’s my doing, that I don’t want to be with her. I do. I want her to move to NYC with me so that we can live happily ever after. I thought she wanted that, too. But I seem to have crossed my signals up somewhere.

She was miserable here. I was miserable last time I was in Santa Barbara. More to the point, if I were to go there now, it would just be this giant thing. The whole time she’d be telling me how much I hate it there and how much I blame her for my having to be there and we’d fight and it would make the whole thing worse and at the same time I’d have to be organized enough to move in another month across the country and try to convince her to come with me. It’s all just nuts.

I don’t see why people who love each other can’t just love each other and be together and stay together instead of all this other stuff. I don’t understand women at all. I don’t understand why they love me and run away from me at the same time.

I really want to be with her and she says she really wants to be with me, but every time we get to the same place, it doesn’t last. I finally put a stake in the ground and try say “I’m not leaving here until I’m leaving for the place, so that we’re not always moving around each other,” but it looks like that may well break us up, too.

What the hell is wrong with my generation that people just can’t let themselves be together?

My life is littered with women that want to love me from a distance and say that I’m the one that got away. I can’t handle too much more of that. I’d rather have my guts absolutely hated by everyone.