Gonna ramble about whatever comes to my mind today. I was going to write about my two favorite songs, Driving the Last Spike by Genesis and Flood by Tool, or at least they are the two songs that have probably had the deepest impact on my life and because this journal I’m doing is like I want it to be as much about joy as about pain. So often with me, and probably most other people who keep a journal, you come to your journal to get out your negative emotions and to work through issues or trauma. It’s much more rare it seems to sit down to really analyze and work through the joy in life. But I think if I push myself to do that more then I think I can pull even more joy and wonder from the world around me.
And those two songs bring me a lot of joy.
But that’s not what I’m doing tonight. I guess I’ll talk about this journal, get a little meta. I’ve never done anything like this. I’ve done so many different writing projects and experimented with so many different writing styles… or so I thought. But this one feels so completely different than anything I’ve ever written before. I’m just going as fast as I can without stopping or hardly even thinking about what I’m putting down. I normally try to take great care with every word. I normally try to write something to convince people of something. I try to make a point or a specific message. I always seemed to want my readers to go away feeling a certain way or deciding a certain thing about a certain thing. With this I don’t really care about the reader at all, beyond the obvious of cutting out sexual stuff or references to specific people… but even then I don’t have an absolute rule about not talking about specific people. I just want to make sure it does more good than harm if I do.
But this is now all about me. It’s not about convincing people of anything, it’s just me talking to myself and allowing people outside to see what’s going through my head.
And it’s going to allow me to tell all those stories that I’ve never told anyone before, like the Jehovah’s Witness who came to my door a month before 9-11 and predicted a great act of violence from the muslims (that’s obviously on my mind since it’s 9-11 today) — I was gonna write about my 9-11 story, and how that day impacted me, but I think that may be a bit much for me so early in this process. That is one that’s difficult to talk about.
But then it’s like, why should it be difficult?
It’s not like I did anything wrong.
Sometimes I need to remind myself that you generally aren’t punished for things that go on inside your head. Only for your actions.
That’s the way it should be.
But if that’s true, why are we all so terrified to admit that we’ve had a cold hearted or sadistic thought?
Well no, some of us are terrified to admit those thoughts but others go around celebrating those thoughts. It feels like that is the primary difference between the two parties going into the next election.
I kind of did want to write a bit about that, ramble on about Trump and how me and many of my friends and fellow Americans feel hated. Like, families are so divided and yet they still go to visit each other and have dinner with each other and pretend like they don’t have these huge looming emotional issues. Like, why do we do that?
Like I went out to breakfast with someone who I’ve felt like she hates me for many many years. She wanted to see me and I don’t understand why when she openly votes for the things that want me to suffer. For many years she voted to continue the drug war when she knew I was selling marijuana. Like if you’re voting to send marijuana dealers to prison, and at the same time you have someone you claim to care about who sells marijuana, like why aren’t you talking to them about it? Then when marijuana is finally legalized and you casually go down to the weed store to buy some gummies, you don’t ever stop to think that maybe you should admit you were wrong and maybe acknowledge that people take politics personally.
And maybe that’s the thing. Some conservatives just believe you can’t take politics personally, even if it’s a matter of life and death to you.
It’s like, so many of my friends are scared to go to many parts of the country these days.
If you’re LGBTQ or genderqueer in some way, or an immigrant, or shit, I’m a pretty straight seeming white guy and even I get nervous out there in Trump country sometimes.
Maybe it’s cuz of my stories.
I was kidnapped by a US Marine once. He told me all sorts of stories of killing people and told me the whole point of joining the marines is because you love killing people and that’s kind of the point of the military is to come up with reasons to kill people because killing is just this incredible high.
Like, I can’t tell that story in Trump country, even if I stick only to the facts. I can’t admit that something like that happened to me to the people who so passionately support the military. I’ll get myself shot.
So I can’t be myself with folks like that.
I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling like this.
And it’s like, if some of the Trump supporters who claim to see me as a friend or family member were to read this, it feels like they’d just laugh at my pain and fear and the pain of my loved ones. They’d just roll their eyes and forget about it.
Why does it feel like that to me?
I guess because that’s always the way it felt in the past.
It used to be really hurtful but now I see her life compared to mine and I just think golly I have it good and golly gee I am glad I embraced compassion and teamwork instead of us vs them mentality.
My life is so fucking amazing and beautiful and even as I write about the people who hate me (or SEEM to hate me. Must remember, this isn’t about judging them and hate is NEVER a fact. It’s just a feeling.), I feel this deeper joy, like it’s all this beautiful painting where the dark–no no, it’s like Tool’s Flood, where it’s just grinding awfulness for the first four minutes and twenty seconds. The kind of grinding monotony that makes you question your life choices, but then when it transitions into the real song, you realize it was all worth it. The song just doesn’t work if you skip that four minutes of awful. The meaning just isn’t there.
Anyway, I got off topic.
But maybe that’s why–
It’s like if I was them I’d be fucking pissed off too. I remember when I couldn’t seem to make life work for me. I learned the life hack of committing yourself to your community and always seeing everything and everyone as a team situation. The more I do that the more I succeed and grow wealthy in health, money, and love — but our schools and society teach an us vs them mentality. It’s drilled into our heads.
So the conservatives who work their asses off day in and day out and follow all the rules and then society still shits on them, well they see people like me sailing through life with barely a care and having everything fall in my lap, they assume that it’s some kind of conspiracy against their kind… which yeah, I mean it kind of is a conspiracy against them.
I had a gay roommate once who got into this with me and made me realize something. He once told me that he had faced more discrimination in his life for being an asshole than he ever did for being gay, but that it should be just as important in our society to treat assholes equally as you do gay people.
That really shocked me to think that people think that way… until I searched my own heart and realized that I think that way.
I’d always thought that assholes — as my roommate put it, he said something like “Just because I yell and scream and call people names and say condescending sarcastic things doesn’t mean I should be excluded. That’s just the way I talk. That’s my communication style. I shouldn’t face any more discrimination than someone with an accent.”
And I wonder if that is the conspiracy.
Because to someone like my former roommate, they don’t get it. No one explains it to them. They never get sat down and walked through exactly how it feels and how communication is really supposed to work.
Nobody ever says, “I’m gonna stop talking to you and I’m gonna pass you over for that promotion because you said some things that hurt my feelings and I don’t want you doing that to others.”
They just say, “You aren’t a good fit.” Or they just don’t call you. So you sit around seeing people with less skill than you who work less than you catching all the breaks, getting all the love and admiration, so you get angrier and you fall deeper into that us-vs-them perspective believing that everyone is out to get you.
It’s interesting that often the meanest and nastiest people in the world are the ones who are really fucking skilled at something. When someone can do your roof or gutters faster better and cheaper than anyone else with the highest quality, you’ll often put up with a little nastiness.
So it’s like, after that conversation with my old roommate, I decided that yeah, i am going to be a part of this conspiracy against mean people, but it’s like, I want to expose the conspiracy to them and explain that yeah, we’re not going to want
Something about that last sentence just doesn’t work for me but I also don’t want to delete it.
Like I started getting judgy there for a sec, and like my perspective just doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s hard to put my finger on why I don’t like it.
This is kind of a trip to just see where my mind wanders.
Maybe I need to just call it good on the politics and say this new journal of mine is kind of my answer to so much of the stuff that I’m learning about in A Liberated Mind. This really is one of the top self help books I’ve ever read. So many new concepts that I just haven’t heard in other books before — and I’ve read a lot of these self help books. and it talks alot about just following your mind where it goes and not judging anything that happens but at the same time you can learn to subtly guide it toward more positive experiences and perspectives but without ignoring, and sometimes deliberately moving toward the painful things.
It’s all about feeling your emotions as intricately and intensely as you can, and learning as much as you can. That’s the trick. It’s okay to be afraid of thoughts, even terrified of them, but the fear won’t hurt you. Only giving in to the fear can hurt you. That’s why I’m doing this.
Okay, that’s enough for tonight. Don’t want to overdo it.