The good ship Double Deflection

Wednesday 9/9/26

People don't want to be alone. That's usually the reason why they're together.

Everything is about something else--other things--than the thing it purports to be. That book didn't win that award because it was the best book when it was instead any other mediocre book, which is to say, given what the median now is, a bad book. It won because of other things. Those people aren't together because of their abiding bond, but rather other things. The purported reasons are what are cited. What serves as "official statement" of reason. But it's other things regardless.

Live a lie, you are a lie. You are an actual lie. More lie than a person. A lie incarnate. A lie with legs.

Do you know what a double deflection is in hockey? A player takes a shot. It's deflected on its way to the goal by either a teammate's body or stick or the opponent's body or stick, and then deflected again by one or the other. A single deflection is hard for a goalie to stop. You can't react that fast if the deflection happens close to the goal. You hope it hits you. A double deflection...well, there's even less you can do about it. If you save the puck, that will be a matter of position or luck, not reflexes.

People often lie to themselves, then they lie to you. Double deflection. Were this a shot at the goal, there's no saving it, and there's no saving them. And they're sure as hell not going to do any saving. Most people are absorbed in their own world of artifice. Stylized artifice. Personalized artifice. Bespoke artifice, if you like.

It is easy to only know people who are the same and are doing the same. These people then lie to themselves and each other. They don't have to try--it's who they are. It's their default programming. It's all they "know." You sleep in a position that's most comfortable to you. You're not even really choosing it once you fall asleep--you end up in that position. That's how people live when they're awake. They're forever ankle deep in life. They aren't plumbing depths with powerful underwater searchlights. Tepid, ankle-deep water. That's as far as they're going in.

No one is going to say that, though, are they? Including to themselves. That would crush them. Would destroy their pride, their ego. Would leave them without recourse. They'd have to kill themselves, because they're not strong enough, smart enough, decent enough, brave enough, to try for something else. Something truer, more substantial. They have numbers on their side, and when you have numbers on your side, you have less resistance. It's full speed ahead.

There are, what, eight billion people in the world? All save maybe a few hundred of them aren't this way. This is, in essence, the only way. A bird might not be technically extinct because a couple dozen birds of that species live on some tiny island south of Australia, but so far as the rest of the world goes, those birds are extinct. Same now with people of depth, integrity, intelligence.

This is the reality, because anything else has for all intents and purposes ceased to exist and isn't growable, producable in this world/environment. It could come from within a person, with that being the world/environment. But everything almost everyone is comes from without, not from within. We aren't products of ourselves, our minds, our hearts, our souls, but our environments. We are vastly more products of others here on the human dung heap than we are products of our own selves.

These people will conflate a lack of pushback, any challenge, any call for accountability, truth, assessment, reevaluation, from people like themselves, doing the identical things in identical ways, with affection, attraction, friendship, love. They take it as official clearance of their non-self self, and thus a legitimization of that self. But the truth is that that other person is doing the same thing in their ankle-deep water, with no pushback, no vetting. Self-consumed dolls more than people, with a string pulled in back that makes them say their canned and unconsidered words. They voices might as well be prior recordings for which they press the play button.

That person probably doesn't love you and you probably don't love them because you are both incapable of any such thing. Love isn't common. Love takes things and asks things of ourselves that not only don't we have it in us to give, we don't have in us period. Love takes humility and mystery and a ceding of both control and ego and a high quotient of vulnerability. Love involves faith rather than control. Love is risk. Love is a conscious decision because it requires conscious actions and needs us to be willing to be and become a certain way. It has focus and purpose. It requires selflessness and it never takes any time off. Love is cognizance. Love is vigilante. Love is determining what we can give of ourselves, from deep within ourselves, to another.

It has nothing to do with time or distance. Those things are irrelevant to love and acts of love. Excuses are irrelevant. Love, being love, finds a way to love, always. Or else that's not what it is. This doesn't mean love is an undefeated problem solver. Love sometimes--often--doesn't solve any problems for the person we love. But it's still out there doing what it does to the utmost of itself and its ability. And I think that's a fair word, "ability." Love doesn't just happen. It isn't something you fall into. Much as people would like to believe that. But they want to believe that in a similar fashion to the person who wants to have it be true that walking ten minutes a day makes you healthy.

Love doesn't need reminding. Love doesn't have to be asked twice. Love is specific. It's never general. It's pointed, not airy. To love we must be expansive within ourselves. We must think and think often. We must feel and feel deeply. We can't run from feelings. We can't stifle thought. Love is going up stairs, not down them, then showing up the next day, and the next, and improving. Loving better. The person who loves the best loves better the further they go along. Love is that which is internal given essential external form and energy that surrounds, supports, even when it isn't showy or shouty or brightly lit.

Art is love and love is art. But there's no art in this world now. There isn't going to be either, at least not from anyone else. There isn't even going to be what I'll call "art product" that's made by humans. What do you think this is going to look like in ten years? Can you even imagine? Do you care? If you're reading these words, then maybe you do. But what are doing about it? Throwing up your hands and saying, "Eh, can't fight city hall, that's the world we live in now." It's not an act of God. A person who cares--and loves--would be doing something.

Love also requires self-awareness. Who is self-aware in the slightest now? To be self-aware you need to think. Constantly. Think about hard things. You need to admit hard things to yourself about yourself. Then, you either live with those things, feeling the pain and burden of them, or likely trying to deny/argue them away, or you accept those things, or you do something about those things, with the effort and humility that requires, without any easy or fast fixes. You gotta ride it out. See it through. Work at it. Love is acceptance. The acceptance of that which is easy to accept is easy. The acceptance of that which is hard to accept--profound failings and shortcomings in ourselves--is hard. Love does the hard work.

Do these sound like things people do? People can't even think if they wanted to. A person who stares at screens, a person who doesn't think, a person who doesn't try and grow mentally, emotionally, spiritually, as bare minimums, does not love. They say they love. Of course. They say it to themselves, they'll say it to you. Double deflection.

We can only love as ourselves. Our individual selves. People don't have an individual self. They're a numbered entry in a factory race/species of pods.

Life then fixates on making sure there's no rocking of the good ship Double Deflection, that person's personal cruising vessel. Sailing through the smoothest, shallowest, safest waters. A veritable sea of thin gruel, without so much as a floating pylon of potential truth or pushback to have to navigate around.

Look at publishing. Look at these people. Look what they are and what and whom they insist on being surrounded by. If they see anything but themselves, or something lesser than themselves, reflected back in anyone or anything--be that a colleague, someone they're going to award, hire, hype, or a work of prose beyond their limits of self and capabilities of intellect and talent--that is going to be a problem.

A problem that must be avoided, exiled, ballasted to a watery grave at the bottom of a sea that is fled in favor of a bathtub where the plastic vessel can sail in peace without resistance or reminder and have the whole tub to itself and its officially licensed, interchangeable--which is to say, "NO BETTER"--ships of the line. The Deborah Treisman way. The Sigrid Rausing way. The Chris Beha way. The Ann Hulbert way. The Jackson Howard way. The J.W. McCormack way. The Carolyn Kuebler way. The way of almost all those people in that world. And lest one is about to "go off" and curse me and think, "How can I get that guy? I'm gonna get him!" and the like, remember what I said about exceptions, and he or she who takes offense. Perfect metaphor for publishing. Piloting around the bath tub. These are not the seas of life. David Remnick: Lord Nelson of the bathtub.

People hate accountability. They want to be able to behave without interference and censure. They certainly don't wish to admit wrongdoing. They don't want to humble themselves. They don't want to do the work of atonement which is work done whilst humbling one's self. Pride isn't a part of atonement. They shun any sense of shame. Want it off and away from them as fast as possible.

You have a bad person and a better person. They can't know each other in any significant way for long in a healthy manner. The relationship would be transactional. "What can you do for me?" "This person provides this service in my life, and for them I in turn provide this service of mine." Or a result of a party having no one else, and a truth of life is that you can't live with no one, no matter how strong you may be. Many is the abusive relationship built on this foundation of death. Many is the abusive relationship extended by how keenly this truth is felt.

Let's say one person in the relationship has their own immediate people. They don't love these people because they are not a person capable of love. Having kids doesn't mean you're capable of love. Being capable of love is a you thing. The riot act is read when such an idea is suggested. Here come the words that are flames as fire also shoots from eyes and ears. Because people have to think certain things, no matter how false they are, to live with themselves, because they cannot be humble and are not strong enough after admitting everything they are not to begin to build into being something else.

When people talk of family as they do and cite love, what they often really "love" is not being alone. Being looked at and up to a certain way. Not having to look for sex. Having needs met. Manufactured importance. There is a lot of dependency and co-dependency. It's emotionally transactional. And egotistically transactional. The family--spouse, kids--could be a different spouse, kids, and everything would be exactly the same for that person. It's not about "this spouse and kids," but having the people around to fill roles of gratification and the manufacturing of a sense of purpose for the person, which isn't true, organic purpose.

Such a person has no need for anyone else. There will be no stakes for them in any other relationship. They have the things they want to get by and lie to themselves. They have what they need to make do in a life that purports to be one thing but which is really something else. But they won't see that, won't get into it, and sure as hell wouldn't address it within themselves. It would kill them. They aren't strong to begin with. They've then spent years, decades, of not being strong, which means becoming less strong. They could bear up to the truth about as well as a moth could to a vise pressing down on it. There's no chance. They'd be dust immediately.

So, no truth. None at all when it comes to themselves. Maybe in some other areas, but when you can't deal in truths about yourself, that spreads, and you become a person who deals in very few truths anywhere in life, unless it's convenient, which is to say, those subjects of those truths are far away from your actual day in, day out life, and don't come back on you, or, if they do so, are favorable and ego-feeding.

For instance, you see someone say hateful remarks about gays, you post that this is very wrong, which is as obvious as obvious gets and as easy to say as can be, you feel "moral" and "high character" without having had to put any skin in the game, never mind any aspect of soul. Such are the only forms of truth that such a person deals in. But can we really credit someone for dealing in truth when they say that two plus two equals four? You can be delusional and as truth adverse as anyone has ever been and recognize the correctness of that math.

That person can bail on any other relationship and never think twice about it, because all other relationships are superfluous. The needs are met elsewhere. People are limited. They aren't expansive. Needs, thus, are basic, in addition to their meeting being a game of lies to self, lies about what one is doing, lies about love, etc., which are easy to do and with great dramatic thrust.

Just say words and terms like, "My family!" "My wife!" "It's my kid!" and the societal expectation and response is standing down, no pushback, no mumbled utterance of, "That's not what this is about," never mind, "You use these things and people as excuses to be a selfish prick and bad person." It's like religious people who say God, God, God, and then do awful acts as if cloaked in these robes of goodness that put the acts at the furthest remove from anything awful and actually speak to sacrifice and character on their part. That's how many people use the concept of family. They use their so-called loved ones to justify being selfish and base. Falsified love funds their deceptions.

Not only is nothing easier for this person than to bail on anything that doesn't meet the immediate needs and feed into the system of lies that they will work until the day they die, never having lived a life sans scales over their eyes, but also lied their way on through until the end, as if they were never really here, their lives meaning nothing, which may be a moot point in a world that is now without meaning and where goodness and greatness and character count for and do nothing and make that individual's life worse, but they can turn this around in their heads to further serve their enterprise of self-deceit.

With responsibility to do the right thing removed, with reminders to do the right thing removed, with criticisms that the right things are not being done silenced by separation and claims of "I don't need this," our bad person then has calm and what they call peace. Being a liar to the point that they are a lie incarnate, they can now blame the other party. "It wasn't me, it was them. I'm so much happier now. Glad that's over."

They're not going to introspect. They're going to frame everything in the most favorable way for them, which is what they've done for a long, long, long time. Possibly all of their life, but if not that, then much of it, and certainly as the world has become what the world has become. With no one reading, no one thinking, people staring at phones, people having more time by far than ever and telling themselves and anyone they want to lie to and let down that they have no time, they're so busy, using their dramatic terms that they have come to believe in the marrow of their bones are God-like argument clinchers. "I had a sick kid!"

Because no one would say, "You weren't sitting by her bedside for four days trying to get her to hold on to sweet and fleeting life." Nah. She had a temperature of 99 and ate some toast and watched a movie while you putzed about. People use their kids this way. They'll use anything. Their dead mother who passed six years ago. Because, again, what can anyone say is how they think. They don't even know they're thinking this way. That's how much of a schemer, a liar, an inveterate user they are of whatever and whomever they can lay to hand, including those who are moldering.

This is the world. This is almost everyone in the world. These people are essentially dead themselves. Dead to truth. This is how you have to do it now. If you are the opposite of these people, there is nothing here for you but suffering, pain, loneliness, aloneness. The difference with your aloneness is that you know it. These people are alone in fundamental ways as well, but they don't know it. They know little to nothing that is real and true.

That's how you have to live now--like these people live--for your however many years of "life" on earth, which is simply a process of playing out the string. Normally that expression applies to the very end of something. A last place club in baseball that was eliminated back in August plays out the string over the last two weeks of the season. But we, as non-humans, or post-humans, are effectively playing out the string at thirty-years-old, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty.

We want what we want to hear. We want to believe what is easiest for us to believe. When we get those things--and chances are we've designed our lives so that we can get them as readily as possible, which is why we're with whom we're with, and all that follows, but also everything else we do and pursue (or, more meaningfully, don't)--we aren't going to push back on them. The box has been checked. What? Uncheck it and reevaluate? Throw away the form and engineer a new a new plan with a different survey to fill out once it's underway?

A great person will do that. A person of great character will do that. No one else. And in this world, everyone is virtually the same. There is no individuality. People think--or don't think--the same. They talk the exact same ways. No one even has their own slight style of speaking. Give him his flowers, GOATED, if you know you know, I'm here for it, at the end of the day, literally, literally, literally.

There is next to no love in this world. There's "in my image" and arrogance, and "Only I could have made this person!" and hubris and dependency--a dependency on falsehoods as well, because otherwise there's nothing else without going looking for anything else, with all of the strength, character, humility that takes, plus the scale-less eyes, the bravery. That person who is "loved" could have been anyone else in those circumstances. Those engineered circumstances. It isn't person-based. It's about other things.

This is tantamount to the most offensive thing you could say in this world, because it would be seen as an attack on most of the adults in it. What's it matter? And it's not even that offensive anyway, if you spell it out. See, that's the threat. It's an implied threat. That something is so sacred, so verboten, that it can't even be questioned, examined. What if you do, though, as I just did?

But people are almost always just liars and users. They lie to themselves, then they lie to whomever else they sense, feel, needs lying to. For what they want. For the path of least resistance. For avoidance. They don't even know they're doing it. They are the lie. A lie doesn't need self-awareness to carry out the business of lying. It just does what it does, is what it is.