The Story We Crave, the Peace We Fear

So I re-published This Desert Life, the first novel I wrote in 1999/2000 and disowned for like 20 years. I did what I said in my previous entry: loaded it up into a text to speech app and found that, like yeah, there’s a lot in there that’s still embarrassing, like the way I handle sex and rape and the offensive slur i used at one point and –well a number of other things, but at the same time, so much positive emotions came back to me, and I found it much easier to listen to than I thought I would. Like the parts I’m proud of wound up really overwhelming the parts I’m ashamed of, particularly the way I sort of break the fourth wall, but in a subtle way that’s deep and not just a joke–like Deadpool does a decent job of breaking the fourth wall, but that’s all about comedy, whereas the way I break the fourth wall in This Desert Life is a serious look at our sense of reality, who we are, questioning what’s real and what’s illusion. It’s all about this perspective that I’ve kind of lived in ever since I wrote this book, where I see my life and all of reality as this story created by “God” or my “reader”.
Are you the reader or the writer of your story–or both?
It’s a perspective that adds a ton of value to my life, bringing me confidence, knowing that I’m the hero, destined, not necessarily for greatness, but for something exciting and meaningful, but at the same time it’s my responsibility as the protagonist to take charge of it and build a story worth reading.
So that’s part of why I haven’t written in a while–I was working on putting together the text files, signed back up for midjourney and even got a photoshop subscription for a week to create the cover. This is the first time I’ve done everything myself for my book publishing. In the past I’ve always hired someone off Fiverr to do the cover or even do all the formatting of the book itself, but now with AI, all that is so much easier to figure out on your own.

But one thing I wanted to talk about was the downside of this “life is a story” perspective, because I think a lot of people deep down, kind of feel the same way on some level, they need their life to be a story and I think that’s why we see so many people doing what seems like deliberately sabotaging themselves or their community–because we have this need for real world stories. We need action, adventure, intrigue and conflict, and when our world doesn’t give that stuff to us naturally, we need to go out and make it by causing trouble.
Life is way too easy. And it’s destroying us.
I think that’s a big part of why Trump got elected–“Make liberals Cry again” and “Fight fight fight” — those are two of his literal tag lines that he actually uses–like he and his supporters are openly stating and celebrating that they want to divide our country and fight against their fellow Americans–and I get it, because peace and kindness are boring, especially when you’re young, especially when you have a traumatizing event long in your past but now you are quite safe and quote un quote “comfortable”.
I remember when I was a kid, in seventh grade, I absolutely would have supported Trump because I needed action, I needed fights, I would have given anything for America to fall into a civil war, or any other kind of war that would have brought some action and passion into my life. I was so trapped and smothered with all the safety and rules and reasonableness.
Being reasonable is great and everything, but there’s so many people who hate reasonableness because it makes for terrible stories.
I mean, if you think about it, you never see a story, like ever, where every character, or even the majority of the characters are all decent, reasonable people– there would be no story. If everyone is reasonable, then there’s no conflict, no passion, no excitement, and some of us just can’t handle that kind of boredom.
That’s why I think that the majority of Trump supporters are genuinely trying to tear our country apart, because their lives have become so safe and so monotonous and boring that destroying their country and tearing our community apart is preferable to them over being comfortable and living in a united country.
And I say this because I get it, I feel the same way–I’d much rather live in a war-torn wasteland than to live a life without meaning and purpose.
Like I said, when I was younger this is absolutely how I felt. I prayed for an apocalypse to escape what seemed like a mundane life.

But that’s not a healthy or reasonable way to find your purpose–there are much better ways, and that’s one major reason why I support the space industry so much–because it’s a challenge, it creates a story that we can all be a part of–where the entire human race is the hero of the story. And I guess I should say that this problem is not just happening to Trump supporters–it happens to people on the left just as much–which is why–like I saw a bumper sticker the other day that had a picture of a guillotine and said “In these difficult times, some cuts may be necessary” — I mean, the person putting that sticker on their car is not looking for a nation united, they’re not hoping for a peaceful and equal society, they’re looking for a fight, they’re not looking to express an actual solution to our problems, they’re looking to see Musk and Trump as a force of evil, like the dark side in Star Wars–they’re not looking to understand or communicate their concerns, they’re looking for self-actualization through hate, through the timeless story of good vs evil–it’s like their hate brings them purpose–people like that are just the liberal mirror of the Trump style hate. It’s no more acceptable than the us-vs-them mentality of the right, and deep down, they have to know that it doesn’t bring our country any closer to peace or real solutions, it just perpetuates the civil war brewing.

So what do we do about this?
Well, we need to create a story–we need to build a story that’s about peace and understanding, and we need to find ways to find the same kind of self-fulfillment through the battle against poor communication and greed and us-vs-them mentality that we get from the battle of left-vs-right or American-vs-chinese or whatever other battle we contrive to fill this deep human need.

And we need more sources of adrenaline–like I found out recently that in my home town of Bellingham/Whatcom county, inner-tubing on the nooksack river has been banned because it’s too dangerous, and it’s like, I find that rather hurtful, because I had one of the most important events of my entire life while inner-tubing on that river–that river taught me so much about life and survival and about living my dream, being the person I was meant to be.
I was sucked under a pile of logs, saw my life flash before my eyes, started to accept my death, and then it spit me out on the other side and I got up and the adrenaline–the adrenaline high was so intense after that, it was like all the colors were neon bright, and the birds sounded like this deep and powerful music like I’d never heard before. It changed my life in a massively positive way–
and that’s what they outlawed. Those people who outlawed tubing on the Nooksack, they had to have known there were people like me who had life changing experiences, but they weren’t concerned with the human experience or the story of our lives, they were only concerned with the cold, distant, numbers that say “oh, we can save this many lives by writing this law” — they took a deeply human concept and boiled it down to nothing but numbers, and I’m sure they felt all proud of themselves at how many lives they saved on paper, without ever caring about what we lost.
I honestly don’t know where I would be in life if I had not gotten sucked under that pile of logs. I don’t know if I ever would have truly found meaning in my life. That experience, it kinda changed everything for me.

Now to be fair, the person who I was tubing with, who watched me get sucked under, well, he did not have nearly the positive experience that I had. I didn’t realize until 15 or 20 years later, when we returned to the river to try it again, that he had been a little traumatized by watching me get sucked under.

And also, that river destroyed my dad’s canoe that he’d spent like six hard months building by hand. It was the first time he’d ever taken it out–he got caught by a log jam and the force of the water just turned his boat into splinters, giving him only a moment to climb out onto the logs.

So it’s like, you need to have a balance of safety vs genuine access to adrenaline–

And this is why we have war too–I’ve listened to a lot of mental health self help books and sometimes they talk about soldiers on the battlefield and about how going into battle and experiencing that life or death struggle and having a clear enemy you can hate–well it lifts them up–sometimes soldiers feel the greatest joys of their lives while they’re shooting and being shot at.

So I guess what I’m saying is we need to find new ways of getting that adrenaline, that fear of death, appreciating of life, of getting that challenge in our regular lives.
That’s why I write. That’s why I chose to believe in this idea that I have some kind of mission on Earth to fight back against, not some other country or person, but against this concept of us-vs-them, against the classic storyline that tells us we have to have a bad guy, and that it’s okay to hate that bad guy.
When you look at it like that, you can have the best of both worlds. You can have all the excitement and drama of a wild, twisting and turning adventure, but at the same time, the comfort and safety of a reasonably managed life.

So like, on the surface, we need more dirt bikes, roller-coasters, white-water-rafting and skydiving to get us the adrenaline that our minds and bodies need just as much as we need any other vital nutrient.
But on a deeper, emotional, spiritual level, we need more political discussions with people who oppose us, we need more inner-personal conflict–we need to get the conflict out in discussions on person-to-person levels instead of hiding from it and letting it build behind the scenes into a civil war.

This is probably my biggest complaint about the kink and queer community–the way we hide from conflict, the way we ban political discussions, often going out of our way to make people like me feel unwelcome, simply because we want deep communication and aren’t afraid of a little conflict–when ironically, kind of the whole point of the queer community is that everyone should feel welcome–it’s like this blatant hypocrisy–leaders claim they’re doing it to reduce fights, but they’re only reducing fights at their immediate parties or on their discord server, not in the larger community. We are just hiding from the fights in the short term and letting them blow up into giant community-wide issues instead of teaching people to have the courage to stand up for what they believe in and call people out before things spiral out of control.
Like I see so often women posting these screenshots of men who treat them like garbage in messages, but they always scribble out the names –which to be fair, I think that may be some bullshit policy of FetLife management based on their profit margins–because they get a lot of money from incels who don’t know how to behave
but it’s like, i want to see the names when I read these things. i want to know in case I happen to run into these dudes. I want to know who they are so i don’t wind up inviting them to any of my parties. I want the public to know who they are in hopes that maybe someone can get through to them by actual talking.

And when you post the sick and hateful rants of some man, but black out his name, well then suddenly, he’s no longer an individual, he’s not one specific person who has a series of experiences that led him to be an asshole–instead, now, he’s a representation of all men, and all men wind up getting judged for his behavior, and so people just start screaming about the evils of toxic masculinity, turning it into this gender-vs-gender situation instead of looking at the actual details of the individual and the story of their lives that drove them to that behavior. It takes away our ability to actually address the problem.

This is why I’ve decided I will not be holding back from using real names in this blog.

It seems the further we get into the social-media way of doing things, the further we get from deep and meaningful communication that actually changes people’s minds and moves us forward.

On so many levels, we are hiding from danger to our own detriment–social danger and physical danger and we don’t realize how that makes us feel so meaningless and empty–we just blindly assume “safety good” when the truth is so, so much more complicated.