Rattlers and apple trees

Wednesday 6/10/26

Had a series of dreams last night about a woman from UMass I had dated. Well, she referred to it as dating. One of those stints coming back before I stopped drinking, and then another after I had stopped and we ran into each other in the Common.

I mention drinking like (and not as some "once I was Mr. Hyde and then I was Dr. Jekyl" deal, because that wouldn't be true) this because as of right now it's a fixed point in my chronology. A landmark. The large apple tree you can't miss. A point to measure from and that is easy to call back to mind. And information a doctor would ask me about. "When did you stop drinking?" Spring 2016. The way I've miscounted makes it summer 2016 but it was spring. Sometimes I have these dreams that continue after I've woken up and gone back to sleep. They have these stages. She liked buses and transportation. Later when we were friends I sent her a book about a history of buses. She didn't know who it had come from.

I'll sometimes send notes to people. Sometimes they're someone going through something like a death. Or struggling with depression. Or they're trying to get in shape. Sometimes they're struggling with sobriety. I wouldn't say I regret this, exactly, because it's me being true to me and trying to help and be kind, but the way people behave makes you regret it in some way.

Someone can go on and on about how alone they feel, how they experience no kindness, and along I come with something heartfelt and well-intended, which isn't perfunctory in the least. We know what other people say. It's always the same, isn't it? Cliches. "You got this!" "Sending hugs," hands-in-prayer emojis, or "Everything happens for a reason," because, you know, that's why little children die of cancer and women are raped--it's for a reason. Brilliant.

There's no depth, no specificity, no usefulness. If the feelings motivating the attempt are sincere, allowing that they are, there's nothing in the words that bear that out. And people also put their foot in it and say clunky things. Hurtful things. Someone will die and someone else will say, "At least you still have this other person" or some such. Or someone is trying to get in better shape and someone will say, "You look good for someone your size." People are awful and/or helpless with language. What are they going to do? Be wise and helpful and clear? Or are they just going to be more of the exact same old, same old, because virtually no one alive is capable of doing any more than that?

Whatever I say could only have come from this one person in terms of what it says and how it says it, and they'll respond, "ty" or with an emoji because they are, in truth, the problem and the source of their own problems.

I can't conceive of being this way myself if someone took the time and effort to extend themselves and give of a part of themselves towards and to me to help me in whatever degree. I really can't. But I'm in a very small minority this way.

This is a note I sent to someone yesterday. I'd seen some posts of theirs. They wrote well, which can make it hard to have people even just to talk to, because there is little intelligence in this world. Few people truly want "to do" that which is substantive. Have a real interest in things. Have a need to think. They charted their runs and were trying to improve in their fitness pursuits.

Hello! Random note from Boston in the early hours because I commence work early. Hope you don’t mind. I read through some of your posts much to my early-morning delight. You are a very good writer, smart, funny, aware, and also skilled with nature photography and an impressive runner. If you’ll permit me saying so, I think we should be friends…or know each other. I’m an author. You could check out my site. I run, but rather than on flat ground, it’s up and down a historic obelisk each day. There are so few people these days adroit with language, and grounded, and decent…well, I’d have been kicking myself for not at least saying hi and that didn’t seem like a wise or rewarding endeavor, and hence this note. I’m quite curious about this fellow who ghosted you and what that entailed. Ah, ghosting—it’s a rough thing, isn’t it? I’m hoping in this case—your case, that is—that this was perhaps a miscommunication that will rectify itself. Anyway, I’m Colin.

As one can see, this isn't someone up to no good. There is no ulterior motive. Perhaps two people speak and they become something to each other. What they can be can be all kinds of things. Even just a friendly voice from time to time from afar. That's how the internet should work. One of the ways. We meet people, and they add to our lives as we add to theirs. In whatever capacity.

But we don't have the communication skills, nor the personal skills, nor often the simple human decency, for this to be the case. We see a threat. So, we behave badly, tap out of one screen to opiate ourselves with thousands of others, and then post about ourselves and the lives we're leading as if we weren't all about what we are really all about and were, in fact, the opposite. We live one way and say something else. Broadly, that is. For the broadcasting. We're inveterate liars. We don't do truth. We've made truth this thing that all but kills us.

How far are you going to go when that's the truth? What can you have? Who can you have? What manner of connections can you have? How do you ever have a true connection with anyone?

I don't put anyone on the spot. And I am always kind. And the idea of me, of all people, being up to something, is neither born out or so much as vaguely, somehow suggested in what I say or write, which is definitive as what it is, or, if one knows me better, in my life right now. I do two things--I create, I run stairs. There's nothing else and hasn't been for a long time. And I try to keep going, if you want to add that as a third thing. Everything is on the utmost up and up.

You know what this person said in response? She didn't say anything. She blocked me on Instagram and Threads.

There's your world.

Of course, people enjoy responding in other instances with a dismissive "tk." It has a "take that" quality, preemptive revenge for something that wasn't done to them. They're trying to position you beneath them. Everyone is trying to climb upwards in this pecking order of the miserable. If someone else has 250 followers, it's better for you to have 251. There's so much fear--the kind that stems from insecurity.

I have a different kind of fear which stems from my situation, and as it continues to worsen and time goes on. That I am secure in myself is partly why I am able to treat others as I do. People who doubt themselves and feel like imposters and people with nothing to offer, are people who hurt others (or try to), belittle others (again, or try to), block and shun others, in order to try and make themselves feel better about themselves. Look at publishing. This is a core operating principle.

They don't actually feel better about themselves, though. They only become more poisoned. When you're poisoned, you're poisonous to everyone else, and the world, but also yourself. It isn't like being a timber rattlesnake where your own venom doesn't affect you.

But people lack awareness. They don't know what's happening. They certainly lack self-awareness. They're both unaware of what they're causing--and bringing back upon themselves--and they're slow to realize, if they ever do, what someone else is doing and what that means. I've said time and again that the single biggest problem--and there are millions of major ones--about our world right now is that people can't tell what things are.

Doesn't matter what it is. That thing is the thing it is. And what that is--that reality--is lost on us. We can't think our way through to it. Or we don't have the experiential knowledge because we don't get out enough in the big sense to see something for what it is. You take a good thing and a bad thing, and people can't tell the one from the other. The bad thing becomes the good thing in our society because it's coarse and cheap and lazy; that makes it more familiar to people.

We reward things, and call them good things, based on recognizing them as familiar--not as good. That's why someone who, for example, talks in the same linguistic modules--"hot take," "end of the day," "hill that I'd die on," etc.--is welcomed by others who do and can only do the same, and the intelligent person who uses their own words well is feared, envied, hated. They're a threat.

The same is true morally. Because we are usually bad, we seek to term other bad behavior as favorable because that reflects back on us favorably. The friend who expects their friend to be a good friend like they are a good friend is selfish, demanding too much, high maintenance, that which causes the bad friend to feel a need to "protect their peace." The people who say that phrase are usually the horrible people. The bad friends. The bad everything. The selfish people. The cowards. The people who live empty lives and wish to invert the meaning of everything because that helps in trying to lie to themselves that they're not the issue, when they almost always are.

The whole world works this way now. That's why we have the world we do. Goodness--and certainly greatness--isn't tolerated here. They get in the way of what people are trying to think about themselves.