Tuesday 9/28/21
I won't know you if you don't always tell the truth, or try to the best you can. About everything. By this I mean, you also attempt to step clear of your feelings, what is called "baggage," any agenda, any cop outs. You don't deal in half empty or half full, silver linings, smoke and hindquarters. You only try to tell the truth. Whatever the truth is. Without motive. You speak as someone who cares, has concerns, believes in finding more truth, believes we should all try to find it. If you are not this way, I am out. With no looking back. Conversely, most people will only know people who don't tell the truth.
I do little experiments sometimes. Especially because right now, I have nothing. There's no base, no platform, there are no followers, fans. There's nothing. What there is, is the greatest artist who has ever lived, and the greatest body of work--already--there has ever been. And there's that artist, that person, trying to keep going, to bring who they are, and what that work is, to bear on the world. And for the world to know who that artist is, what that work is. Not 150 people. Not 150,000 people. Not fifteen million people. A lot more. That's this quest.
But I'd written that journal entry yesterday titled whatever it was--snatches from a dating site. Now, there wasn't anything factually untrue in that post. I didn't make anything up about the words one encounters, or the auto-generated texts, or the auto-generated monikers, or even the quote that starts the entry. One will see that quote, I can factually say, dozens of times per day.
The inferences that are drawn are not tricky bits of deduction. That is, no shaky theories are advanced. Everything comes from solid fact, and a huge amount of evidence. Repetitive evidence. Everything I said in that post is true.
Now, I'm writing about what I'm writing about not to hurt people. If I wanted to hurt people, I'd go about it a different way. It's not hard for me to ridicule, if I wished to, someone who is lazy. Or unintelligent, in part because they choose to be. And to pit my skills against someone else's, in a trash-talking contest, when it comes to mental and intellectual abilities, is to court a bloodbath.
Once I was mentoring this child, and she was saying how she didn't want to mount some argument against me, even just to get her own thoughts straight. Not argue against me, per se, so much as test out her own theories and ideas aloud. And she said, "How could I do that? You could destroy me." I looked at her and I said that I would never do that. And I asked her to tell me what she thought. And that it would be my honor for her to do so.
So when I'm writing about something like that topic yesterday, I'm not trying to squash people. Are people referred to as dumbasses? Yes. Because they are. But not because of how they came into this world, or something fundamentally endemic to them. They made a choice, and their choice causes me both offense and suffering. They cause wide-scale suffering, in that people like this--and there are millions of them--are responsible for dragging down human society, culture, and the human condition itself. That's a decision they make. And I think that's putrid. Horrible. Selfish. It hurts them, it hurts people they know, it hurts me, someone they don't know, it hurts all of us, really, in a way. Why do you think people are alone? Why do you think they are broken? Why do you think everyone is depressed? Why do you think mental illness is rampant as it has never been before?
So, yes, that offends me. I think that's a horrible way to be, a horrible way to treat one's fellow human, and there is no excuse for it. You should try your best in this life. These people don't try at all.
I'm not writing to slam, but to call out. But I'm also not going to be all cuddle-y. I don't believe in that, certainly in some contexts. I believe in reality, and standards, and working hard, and earning your self-esteem. I believe in sharp angles rather than rounded corners.
I know, though, that if I put up that post on my Facebook author page--which virtually no one follows--that people will unfollow me. That's what happened. I do it just to confirm. Because if you have zero followers, or 200, or 10,000, it's really the same. They're all pretty close to zero, when you get down to it. I'm not after 10,000 or 167K or 2.1 million. I'm after bigger numbers than that. So I don't really care in the meanwhile. I'm more apt to use what's there as a lab.
But had I lied, and said everyone is awesome, everyone is living their best life, everyone is amazing and inspiring and super duper great, and everyone is also a brilliant writer, and love love love, then no one would have gone anywhere, because I was saying utter fucking idiocy with no basis in fact, truth, reality. I find that as offensive as anything, outside of publishing, just about, can be. Because that's treating people like utter fucking morons. People who are so stupid they can't understand the difference between hot and cold. I can barely tell you how offended I'd be if someone treated me that way. How little respect they'd truly have to have for me to treat me that way. That's like denying someone their human brain. That they have a working cognitive organ. That they're not at a level above a dog.
That's what people want, though. That's who they want to follow. But it's more. That's who they want to be friends with, though they're not really friends, their lie-fest buddies. That's who they want to be surrounded by. It's often who they want to marry. Isn't that something? Everyone's out there with no true regard or respect for each other, at the most basic, bare minimum of levels. And they stand for that.
It's like saying, "Hey, treat me like shit you have no real respect for, and I'll do the same for you, and this can be the whole of our empty lives. Hooray. Anything is better than thinking, accepting, changing, moving forward, trying, knowing."
But it's not, is it?
