Bury the bar, a truism about excuses, takers and fakers, a tool in a Borders, word counts

Thursday 11/27/25

People want you to bury the bar on their behalf. To have no standards for them. If there are no standards, they can do no wrong. They are never at a fault. They expect you to do what you must to enable this configuration. If you don't, you are the problem. They will also simply move on or avoid you, in favor of those who meet this requirement of theirs. Who does so will inevitably be someone like them who expects the same thing.

Such a person can't have a healthy, true relationship of any kind, with anyone. And there's a lot of your world, right there, because it's filled with such people, overrun with such people, and almost exclusively such people. The mores of those people then become the mores of the world, which is to say, the normal ways of the world. What kind of world is that? An awful one. This one.

A truism: People who make many excuses for themselves will expect you to make even more for them than they do in that they will always expect you to provide them with an excuse, without exception. If you don't, they'll shut you out. They'll blame you for some bad thing that you never actually did. These people surround themselves with people who will have no expectations for them, usually because those people don't actually care about these people.

They can be married. They often are. They aren't together in whatever capacity because of how they feel about each other, but rather because neither taxes each other in this way. They're basically ambivalent about each other. Then they breed, so they can feel important and substantive. They'll be awful parents like most parents, because this is how it goes with most couples and why they are together and why they had children. The children become adults. All of this repeats.

No one has any real friends, because real friendship involves standards and accountability and being there for someone else because that person is cared about. The friend is not the "obligation" that the child or spouse is. That's how such people look at the friend. In the pecking order. The friend cannot deny that person sex. The friend isn't the child who looks up to daddy and this is what an empty person like daddy needs to feel validation and self-worth, and positions his child to see him in this way so he can get these things, not because it is best for the child, which tends to be secondary.

That's the thing about friendship--it's motivated by something very pure, good, and decent. Marriage can be motivated by not wanting to be alone. It often is, isn't it? Who wants to be alone for the rest of their life? Who can even spend ten minutes in a room without any sound or distractions and just their thoughts? Can you?

When I am kind to people, they almost always make me regret it in the sense that they immediately show how ungrateful and undeserving they are of that kindness, but I don't regret in the other sense that who I am and how I conduct myself and give of myself is important to me personally. They do not deserve kindness, but I deserve to be someone who feels the way he does about himself because he lives up to his standards.

I do a lot for people that I don't mention here. I've done things for people today. Most everyone just takes, though. Take, take, take. They don't give. And they cannot even say so much as "thank you" for what they've been given or someone has taken the time and energy to do for them, when they certainly didn't have to.

We're just a race of takers and fakers now.

There are people who take to social media and they'll say they can't go on much longer. They need someone to talk to, to listen. They are so alone. No one loves them. Etc.

I'll reach out to these people. I'll use my words as only I can, which I say because this isn't some moron sending along a vapid cliche or two in the hopes of maybe finding some accessible holes to orgasm in. It's a note unlike that person has ever received in their life from anyone. And you can see who I am, obviously.

Those people couldn't be less grateful. They don't want someone. They don't want wellness. They're ingrates. They don't deserve the kindness. Which you are made aware of almost every time. But there they are, complaining. They get what they say they need, and it can be a very pure version of what they say they need, and they won't even say, "Thanks." And they wonder why their lives are what their lives are. And people wonder why the world is what it is, when almost everyone in the world is like this, so what can anyone even be to anyone?

You can say, "So and so doesn't deserve to know me," and "So and so doesn't deserve what I do for them," with the very real possibility that there's nothing that so and so does for you or would ever, and thus stop knowing them and choose only to know those who do deserve you and what you do for them, but the truth is, you will end up knowing no one, or at least it's a very real possibility.

Do you recall the expression, "If you can't beat them, join them?" I think of that regularly in our world, because being a good person, being a smart person, being a curious person, is akin to being engaged in a contest against everyone else, with "winning" being having what you desire and what you deserve, and being treated as you desire and as you deserve. Instead, you lose.

But the bitch of this is, is that you can't join the other side, so to speak. If you are truly intelligent and truly good and truly curious, you can't un-become those things. The joiners, as such, are just "fortunate" enough--though their lives are meaningless, and they are meaningless as people, and indistinguishable from each other--that they were automatically on that team. Bad people and stupid people just become bad and stupid people who died and it means nothing at all that they were ever alive. They were just bad and stupid people who eventually died. But right now, in this world, that's the way to go. And if you're dumb enough, you never have to know.

In college, I worked in a Borders, back when there were enough readers in the world so that there could be a place like Borders. My job was in the cafe. Each day, there was this guy who came in who made it very clear that he was a writer. He was working on a novel. This was before laptops. He wrote in longhand.

The staff made like he was very important. He was just some unpublished guy, but his whole persona, his apparent entire reason for being, was to embody this affectation. He was spoken of in these hallowed terms by the people who made him his "special" lattes that had like these extra five stipulations.

"Robert has been here for four hours already working on his novel."

I was talking to him one time and the subject of New Yorker fiction came up. This was the 1990s. And this guy--who I knew had never, and would never, think critically, think for himself, about something like this, and instead took his marching orders from what he thought he was supposed to say--began telling me that every short story in The New Yorker was masterful, the very best writing there was and there could be no questioning of this. He even made his voice go higher than you'd think it would have been able to go, like he'd become a woman for a few seconds.

If The New Yorker was a carbuncle-covered naked fat guy who had come into this Borders cafe and jerked off in front of the pastry cabinet and there was his semen on the floor the color of mucus when you are ill, this Robert guy would have dropped to his knees and lapped it up, proclaiming it better than any five-stipulation latte he'd ever had.

Again, he was spoken of in hallowed terms by the staff. A man you couldn't disturb. A man who wanted the music turned down just so. And each time I'd think, "He's a fucking tool."

Sometimes I wonder what he's up to now. He's probably a great writer.

I mention word counts a lot in these pages. Yesterday I might have said that I wrote 7000 words in the morning, which was true. Word counts mean nothing to people. That is, they have no idea what any word count number means. It is, as we once said, Greek to them.

I'd wager that most adults have never written more than 100 words for any one thing since they became adults. Not a letter, not an email, certainly not a text. A "long" text is double digits words. Twenty would be voluminous. This entry is 1500 words long.