I Don't Want to *Talk* About It 2/2: The Fatale, The Vitale and the Banale

 The Most Depressing Revelation I Ever Had

"D" is explaining to the table of gathered peers, that he suspects there's a taboo in our society about a very specific phenomena - that phenomena is the offence a guy feels, when it is revealed that someone is attracted to you who you feel should know that you are not in their league.

Now, there's probably a lot to unpack, including the privilege of physical safety that means you don't have to contend with the pros and cons of having someone you aren't attracted to, attracted to you.

But I could attest, then and now, that the phenomena is real as well as the obvious knowledge that when this happens to you it is a dick move to ever speak about it.

And while this was "D"s articulation of a taboo, and I was very young and a late starter to my love life, I had already experienced this phenomena a number of times when he said it.

I have also written about how "nice girls" are underdiscussed and as such will likely persist as a fact of life for many men and lesbians.

But I'm beating around the bush, time to unpunctually ejaculate the most depressing revelation - my experience of this phenomena was not one I could wash my hands of, I had in many ways brought it on myself by treating female peers with dignity and respect, almost like they were people, and this gave them the impression, that I *liked* them.

In the first episode of AMC Comedy-procedural 'Psych' I ever saw, season 2, episode 15: "Black and Tan: A Crime of Fashion" protagonist Sean Spencer tells his father the dating advice "treat a woman like a person, then a princess, then a goddess and then a person again." from which you can probably get a sense of Sean's character and maybe an idea for a video about how some old show is problematic.

It has echoes of the blatantly sociopathic 'D.E.N.N.I.S' system from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia practiced by Dennis Reynolds, and those were also likely the times with "How I Met Your Mother" somehow a more dated sitcom than Seinfeld, that took the 'Friends' formula and edge lorded it by inserting the character of Barney based on 'The Game' a book by Neil Strauss about pick-up artists.

But if we just throw away most of the advice and keep only "treat a woman like a person" is this good advice to give a guy nervous about a date and should it be?

I read maybe two of the many articles that arose explaining the "Nice guys of OKCupid" and have recently relitigated it on my blog. One of the most memorable bits of explanation was that women have a right to have friends. 

Now I infer the authorial intent being an admonishment for straight men, or any men or boys interested in women to approach sexual politics as transactional, a dance of quid-pro-quos. Btw I don't think we are there yet, as I do think, for example, that if a woman won't let a guy pay for anything on a date it is a good indicator that she is of two minds about you, it is a defence against a quid pro, even if there's no discussion of quo yet.

I'll 'yes-and' this right though and say another indicator that women are free to have male friends, is the disbanding of the 'friend-zone' and here I am drawing on the sentiment proffered by Miyuki Konno, aunt of Makoto Konno main character of 'The Girl Who Leapt Through Time' re:her best friend Chiaki's love confession which I'll paraphrase because I don't have time to find the exact quote: 'I think if you were to date and it didn't work out, you are both mature enough to go back to being friends'

More Depressing

Okay, say you like someone in that way, but you can't for whatever reason, just ask them out on a date. Maybe there's some risk involved like you are co-workers and there's policy that could get you in real career trouble if it didn't pan out. Maybe you have just spent so long enjoying imagining how great your relationship would be if it happened, that resolving it risks rejection and then you would lose the ability to enjoy imagining your relationship anymore and you just can't make that leap.

So you are going to opt for the age-old routine of flirting and hoping that something will happen.

What is the worst possible way to prosecute this strategy?

See I would have guessed, that the single worst way to go about it, would be to talk about being interested in someone else. 

Now, what I'd concede, is if you were playing a longer game in flirtation, say you were hopelessly crushing on someone who was already in a relationship, and maybe their partner was jealous and insecure, there may be some utility in trying to deliberately retard the tension and cool off the situation by throwing up a smokescreen as a security blanket.

I'm not saying, that jealousy makes no sense. I was a mid-90s kid, I remember George Costanza remarking that 'everbody knows you like the person you talk to about your dates more than the person you are dating.' I just see it as stupid on the risk front.

Like yeah, send someone you like the message that you don't like them and in fact like someone else.

Seemingly obvious enough, that this was my operational assumption basically until I saw an evolutionary psychologist talk about polyamory which is what? Like ten years ago now. 

I do not lament the relationships I didn't have because I didn't talk to them enough about other girls I liked, what I lament and find depressing is the hurt and rejection I caused, because I thought a girl and I were so obviously and thoroughly friends. 

I thought this because they were friends I confided in, appreciating the insight they could bring into female perspectives, about the women who were bending my mind like a pretzel. 

Vaguely aware that there are people who might try and drive a woman they don't respect into a fit of envy that has them throw themselves at them, I also put a lot of trust in the ability of my female friends to read in me, that the angst I was experiencing over someone else was real, or possibly idealized but still having a very real effect on me.

I was not half-arseing these conversations, I was whole-arseing them, and as such thinking that they were safe conversations that could not possibly be misconstrued as my interest in them as a romantic partner.

And on at least three occasions, I was wrong. That takes me beyond 'shame on me'.

The Even Worsening Depressiveness

One of the worst things to happen to me, was to fruitlessly court a woman from whom I was perceiving mixed messages, that bent my mind up into a full Nelson, but more damagingly lead me to lose confidence in my ability to read subtext.

Again, I'm sure I've written before, that my road to recovery was paved in a study of body language, that built my confidence up again, even if largely a placebo.

Now I conceited myself to be fairly direct and unmixed and undiluted in my own messaging all my life. So I had this consolation that I had never made anyone suffer like I had suffered.

Recently though, I was talking to one of my Sarah friends, about having to reconsider this source of consolation. See thrice in my life, in my direct way, I've told a woman that I would rather be alone than be with them. One was a breakup, the other two rejections.

I need to be extra clear, that I never communicated this in those exact words that can be read as adding insult to injury. The facts were there to be observed, when I declined the relationship or encounter on offer, these people were going to see that I had nothing going on in my love life anyway, so they were just going to learn that I would rather be with nobody than them.

Sarah felt safe to flag this for reconsideration, because Sarah had rejected me, albeit she said she'd rather be with someone else than me, not nobody, and not even grief. I wanted Sarah's opinion on whether my honesty was not the best policy.

I don't think anybody relishes rejection, not anyone with a functioning consciousness. 

But I also don't relish lying. There's this line in Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang":

[Verse 3]

Music played, and people sang
Just for me the church bells rang
Now he's gone, I don't know why
And 'til this day sometimes I cry
He didn't even say "Goodbye"
He didn't take the time to lie

 Like I think I've been through what that last line in verse 3 might be getting at, as a lamentation, when a girl rejects you and tells you 'sorry but there's somebody else' and in wanting to know what you lack, you look for that someone else, try to figure out that somebody else's identity, and then eventually realize that there wasn't somebody else, it was just a polite lie or maybe a functional lie from a fear of safety and maybe on some level you count the thought and not the lie.

In my early 20s though, I was fortunate to get trained out of excuses, when I realized that excuses often met with rebuttal requiring more excuses and it is simply more efficient, when you feel safe, to just say 'no' and no is what I have said, when I've been feeling it, and I've slept like a baby.

Not Worse, But Not Safe

So facebook had some lawsuit where in discovery memos turned up where medical professionals had warned them that giving users beauty filters for instagram could cause girls to develop dysmorphia and facebook just plowed ahead in the name of Mammon or whatever.

I'm aware of the effect 'beauty ideals' have on women and girls, and its probably never been worse than now. What was tricky for me, is that I'm into pinup art, and pinup art has never been real, particularly the more stylized cartoony art I prefer rather than your WWII oil painting pinups, that often merely infantalise women rather than promote literally impossible waist-to-hip ratios and what not.

A mitigating strategy I thought of, was to try and depict the women in my life, as to how I would interpret them into a pin-up. To understand before they make unrealistic comparisons of themselves to cartoon characters "this is how I see you." Please don't compare yourself to a cartoon, but compare you as a cartoon to my other cartoons and see that basically you are also idealized by my eyes. Like if Matt Greoning's partner got concerned that they didn't have an underbite, and had too many fingers, and Matt Greoning drew them and was like 'see I draw everybody with an underbite, it's how I do faces.' This is what attraction is.

Unfortunately, nothing can close the door on someone else's mind rejecting this proposition and replacing it with 'this is how tohm wished I looked, not how he sees me now with love and attraction vision' and like the beauty filters, my own art regardless of my intent, contributed to or in some way exacerbated dysmorphia and dysphoria.

I also can't close the door on someone taking how I see them in cartoon form, and comparing it to other drawings and deciding because they prefer a drawing I did of someone else, that I must prefer that someone else too.

I don't really have a segue, but the point being, just as I naively assumed it was safe to discuss women I like with female friends, without them reading into it some subtext that actually I don't like the woman I say I like, but in fact I like them; I also can no longer assume naively that it is obvious to the woman I am with, that I like the woman I am with on account of my being with them, being in a relationship with them, sharing intimacy with them.

I won't lie, I enjoyed discussing my sexuality with Ale, and everything I'd learned about it through my art and experiences. I felt safe doing so, because in terms of my preferences, Ale had won. She had me, I was there. We would talk about her sexuality, and Ale was safe to do so, because I experience, I feel, low levels of jealousy. 

What I don't want to literally talk about anymore

Is what I am attracted to, in women, to women. And this one burns me up in a totally different way of being unable to talk to my friends about their fragile egocentricity.

In this case, it is because given my understanding of the topic, I interpret my responsibility to discuss my own sexuality, my preferences, my visual nature and personality and attachment style, as pure text. No subtext.

But I cannot control for subtext. In western traditions, close-reading appears to have been created by Philo of Alexandria, who may have been the earliest example of somebody reinterpreting scripture to harmonize it with contemporary mores, in his case to reconcile the stone age barbarism of Mosaic texts with the works of Aristotle and Plato, sophisticated bronze age texts, maybe even iron age.

Close reading in contemporary times is now more akin to, what's the latest example I saw, making a video essay about how 'Harry Potter' is secretly about social class. 

If you haven't been following this post so far, here is a slight recap of the depressing revelations I have had - I can't talk to female friends as people without risking this being construed as romantic interest, and I can't talk to female friends about romantic interests without risking this being construed as subtext stating I am romantically interested in them, and I can't talk to female friends about my sexuality without risking this being construed as me being a sexual authority on the relationship they have with their own self-image.

I want to talk to you about something, not to you about you, and where it is about you it is not about you specifically but generally, like I value your insight into the general experience of being a woman.

Revisiting my social media dog-pile

I might be a bit vague here because I plan to write about this as an example in a post about what's wrong with me, suffice to say that what I experienced here is kind of the antithesis of this post, it's something I'm happy to literally talk about with women, but have learned not to shout it into the respective abysses of web 2.0, here's hoping web 1.0 is okay.

Basically, my problem is, my attachment style, it isn't a recipe for sustainable relationships and flourishing mental health. In my 20s I ran headlong into these dysfunctions, and the thing about an attachment style, is it kind of dictates who you are attracted to, arguably as powerfully as sexuality. 

In my late 20s/early 30s I had enough experience to start unpacking the problem, and understand the work for me was to imagine a counterfactual self and start empathising with him, and making choices like he does to find a partner that would feel healthy rather than familiar.

I wanted to begin recalibrating, and I began to suspect that there might be a sex difference I was projecting causing me to mistake someone for someone else.

In brief, I did an audit of all the women I had dated, was attracted to, became infatuated with. I recalled my earliest profound impressions of them, and started noticing a pattern. I noticed that they didn't just stand out figuratively, a face in the crowd that caught my eye, but literally: they were standing alone. 

They didn't have friends clustered around them, when I met them, they sat in kitchens alone, stood alone, danced alone, arrived alone, left alone etc. even in crowds full of people. I did not regard them as sickly strays from a pack, but independent, strong.

But my experience of the subsequent relationships I had, were often not of someone confident and self-assured, but someone crippled by anxieties and riddled with self-doubt and insecurity.

So I was wondering maybe if there was a sex-difference between men and women, and if a solitary nature was indicative of dysfunction in women, more so than status.

I wrote up a scenario and asked for female insight, aware of groupthink, I requested female friends slide into my DMs. People were active on facebook back then, so within seconds a female friend commented publicly on my post something simultaneously righteous and vacuous, which I interpreted as basically saying it is not legitimate to draw inferences from behaviour when it comes to women, an absurd piece of special pleading.

Annoyed I bit back, in what I'd describe as a douchey way. That lead to a pile-on, that quickly grew out of specifically my control. On that front, I opted to do nothing, and I got answers from female friends in my DMs so it accomplished what I'd hoped, albeit with side effects.

That incident was pretty early in the timeline of the ongoing project to figure out how to navigate my own sexuality and sexual preferences. 

I would honestly do it again, except the world's moved on from facebook as a public square and you know the women that catch my eye historically haven't changed, so there's nothing more for me to explore, but I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, let alone most people as I think other people would care and as such may not survive such a dogpile. 

Modern Times

Something I literally can't talk about with women anymore, is the construct of 'femme fatale's which might be understood as women of a certain appeal that promise a low risk that they will ruin your life. And to be clear, low risk is bad, meaning it is a fairly safe bet that they will ruin your life. They are almost certain to ruin your life. 

Women who promise excitement, but that excitement is going to be in the form of drama rather than transcendent experiences. 

In the most pronounced cases, you may find yourself having to speak to an emergency operator about keeping them alive when they overdose, in less extreme cases, you may find yourself sharing a rather stable domesticated life with someone who is eternally restless, half-in-half-out slowly torturing you to death.

For me, I know I am drawn to the challenge, and as I've written recently, that is largely based in an unconscious desire to vicariously rescue my mother, and by doing so vicariously rescue myself.

Now the thing is, I would prefer not to work through this project in real life, skipping all the vicarious rescue and just rescuing myself through therapy, for which I've been largely successful. A therapuetic process though, is to work through these issues via creative fiction, to use the power of imagination to heal myself.

As such, decades ago I created a board on pinterest that I labelled 'people photo reference' and quickly I pinned so many images to the board it became functionally useless. I'd estimate that once a board hits 4,000 pins on pinterest, it can take a full hour to scroll through it looking for the reference image I want.

So at some point, I created a new board called 'femme fatale' and knowing me I probably mispelled it 'femme fatalle' because I don't speak Franch. And then set about reorganising it, pulling images off my generically named 'people photo reference' that to this day probably has 14 photos of like Indigenous peoples from National Geographic, Male Athletes and is mostly photos of beautiful women.

So here's the kind of thing I don't want to literally talk to women anymore (which isn't quite true, I'd be dying to discuss it if I felt it was safe to do so, I don't want to experience the fallout of discussing my sexual preferences with women and the close reading they might do so to feel worse about themselves...) I noticed quickly that an instant way for a woman to all-but-disqualify herself from being re-pinned to my 'femme fatale' board, was if she was holding her smart phone in the picture, taking a photo of her reflection.

Like the beginning of this process where I noticed I was interested in women who could attend a party without female friends to hold their hands, I noticed I wasn't interested or rather, captivated, by women who were photographed in the act of taking a selfie.

I wasn't filtering consciously at first, so here's the processing I did to try and make something conscious of my own filtering behaviour, and what I speculated up was this:

Women who are photographed have already convinced someone they are a worthy subject, women who photograph themselves are appealing to others for validation. One was contextually in-control, the other contextually out-of-control.

The above is speculation, as such, it would be wonderful to discuss, the thing is, there probably is going to be subtext, like the degree of admiration I feel for the subjects of femme fatale imagery, someone might come to the preposterous conclusion that because I value something it is therefore of value. When I consciously feel, that admiration is a pathology on my part.

With a mature, secure woman we could discuss this, and we could discuss my base hypocrisy in observing that while unnamed and largely unfeatured in media, there is the masculine counterpart to the femme fatale in the homme fatale, and I would tell women and girls to avoid them like the plague. 

The value of such discussions, is immense to me. Life changing.

There are possible boundaries I can put on such discussions, the example I have picked, is one I feel particularly safe because I can describe it as pure behaviour, not image. Are you holding a phone in the shot that's camera lens is pointed at a mirror? If yes, in most cases I don't get a femme fatale vibe, just as if Humphrey 'Bogey' Bogart walked into his office and Mary Astor was picking her nose, might disqualify her as a femme fatale. 

What I don't feel safe to do, is show women images of women that I pinned to femme fatale because of all the aforementioned depressing revelations. In the Robin Williams movie "What Dreams May Come" he meets his own daughter in the afterlife and she has taken the form of like a Thai Airways Air Hostess based on a comment he made that impressed his daughter that some rando Air Hostess was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen.

That kind of unsafe that would arise from a fact that frustrates me - that images of women are disproportionately representative of models, as in the extreme rather than the average. I won't deny that I'm not some superficial pig but instead someone who finds the average woman attractive. But certainly I don't need anyone to be an extreme before I notice them, merely above average. Furthermore, models tend to be disproportionately young, and I am definitively not attracted to youth as in the common demographic definition of 'youth' being 18-25. I can find young people physically attractive, but generally can't stomach the idea of having to converse with them for any extended period of time, just because that age is predictive of regurgitating trite received wisdom.

So no, much as I'd love to compare images from my femme fatale board with the one I'll move to next, I don't think I can because I think the danger is too great that someone else will fixate on the prevalence of like waist to hip ratios, bust size etc. unconsciously internalizing this, when these features are merely predictive of somebody being a model or influencer, not a femme fatale.

Nathan Fielder and the Femme Vitale

A few years ago I reluctantly returned from Mexico to Australia, disoriented. Since then the project of my life has been imagining a future that I can work towards. I've explored a few dead ends, but things are coming together now.

Coming together such that I could dedicate time to imagining a future relationship. Reevaluating where I am at.

There is no specific love interest I have, and there has not been since my last relationship failed. My pervert eyes - the ability to notice women I am attracted to - have not come back fully, though there's glimpses of them here and there. 

There are complicating factors like where I want to live geographically. Long term, and it's a separate post, I see myself back in Mexico. There's an outside possibility that Australia could change structurally, and I might consider staying here, but hope is not a strategy, nor something to aim at.

In between here and Mexico though, I was feeling a desire to stop by Italy, to meet someone in Italy en route somehow to Mexico. Absurd and ridiculous, dating is hard enough, now it's like "okay I need to meet someone in Italy and persuade them to come with me to Mexico."

Why Italy? I think I was just looking at a lot of aquiline noses at the time. I learned about the existence of Eritrea and I feel that Eritrea might have the most beautiful women in the world, but, I have to be honest, Eritrea sounds like maybe one of the worst countries on earth.

What I found myself circling conceptually, beginning with aquiline noses, taking me to Italy, distracting me with neighbours like Eritrea, Ethiopia, Greece, Egypt, Isreal, Morocco, Lebanon...back to Italy, Italian, the language, the hand gestures, the longing I felt.

Vivacity. I was really craving vivacity. I was desiring to be around, in the privileged company of, somebody who felt alive. I felt guilty, confused, because I don't think many people would describe me as 'vivacious' though I did just win a laminated award having been voted 'Life of the Class: Contributes humour and positive energy' which I don't feel I deserve, because my recollection of my energy was that it was more often negative.

I don't feel I've earned a vivacious partner, I'd be afraid of becoming some kind of energy vampire. My creative process I fear, looks a lot like, to the casual observer, clinical depression. Time in my imaginarium creates an outward appearance of low cognitive function, I grind to a standstill when my mind is most active, which is when I feel most alive.

I should explore this, I thought, and created a board titalled 'Femme vitale' still not understanding Franch, I guessed it would just be 'vital' but turned out my stereotyping was grammatically accurate. 

I started filtering images in, of women who seemed vivacious, and noticed this had little overlap with how I filter for femme fatales. That was interesting in itself. I also noticed, that when it came to femme vitale's a selfie was not as reliable a disqualifier - it is if the camera is positioned over the woman's face. That woman is dead to me, by my grasp of french, but not deadly.

I began to notice that I was perhaps being too simplistic, many of my early pics were merely ones in which women were smiling. I thought of Mx columnist Clemintine Ford, author of 'Fight Like A Girl' and how in one of her Mx columns, she'd recounted a friend telling her that feminism was a process by which to 'figure out a way of being a girl that doesn't hurt' and maybe I was just picking genuine smiles from fake ones.

So for a while I looked through my pins trying to find images of women who felt vivrant, vivacious, alive while not necessarily smiling. I found some.

I was likely doing this variation of doomscrolling while watching the second season of Nathan Fielder's 'The Rehearsal' on HBO which my sister had recommended to me. In the second season, Nathan discovers that the first season of HBO had unintentionally resonated with an Autistic fandom. People who claimed that his absurd infinitely nesting rehearsal projects were just what they needed, that they were desirable.

I'm sure Fielder's the kind of genius that tightly planned every single moment and beat of his second season, while still using non-actors and putting them in his surreal situations. But the plot of the second season involves him going to an Autism support centre, where an employee assumes and/or heavily implies that Nathan Fielder is autistic. There is then a scene where she explains the 'Reading the Mind in the Eyes' diagnostic tool, and the show demonstrates fielder struggling with two multiple choice questions. 

I found this curious, guessed that the test would probably be freely available on the internet, and took it. I am going to Fielder my results, following his lead, because that seems more amusing to me just as it was in the show. But it occurred to me that I was likely in distinguishing between images that were of 'femme fatalles' and 'femme vitales' or neither, that I was doing the same exercise, or employing the same mechanism.

Now, like most humans, I wouldn't rate myself as like a human lie detector. I certainly couldn't distinguish between a serious picture and a rhetorical one, which is to say, an image that captures a real moment, and an image that captures a performance. 

In some cases I can be confident, like a sprinter crossing a finish line and having a sudden change of emotional state, is too method for most actors. I think Flo Jo is having a genuine response to winning a gold medal in the 80s.

But in other cases, you know, particularly since Pinterest became compatible with TikTok content, you can get a still image taken from a TikTok video, and in the still image feel like you are seeing one thing like a moment in a story, and then the TikTok video it is taken from, reveals it is a frame from a completely vapid and shitty Macarena style dance while a woman lip syncs along to some song they think is really cool, but is in fact, quite lame.

It's not that, but it's cueing in to things like confidence, self assurance, and even the non-verbal cues as to whether this person taking a selfie is documenting a moment in which they are happy with themselves, or appealing to 'the internet' for validation from women and girls that share their insecurities and dysmorphia.

Just to be clear, the latter inference does not get pinned to my femme vitale board.

But again, I don't want to literally talk about it with women anymore, and particularly not show any images, because I can't control the subtext, and in this case, it becomes even worse than having inferences drawn about female value generally from how I am unconsciously categorizing femme fatales, because the femme vitale adds the pressure of needing to be happy, whereas a femme fatale can wallow in being a hot mess.

Kate the Femme Banale

Lastly, my friend lent me this book, and based on the tital alone 'Wellness' I was like 'sure!' and even 'great!' and grabbed it without even judging its cover. I expected a non-fiction popular science book investigating the wellness space, Gwyneth Paltrow and all that crap.

I got home and as I went to open the cover discovered in a quote, that I was opening up a work of fiction. A novel.

Now I was confused, and as I wrote to my friend, my favorite thing about having a friend lend me a book, is when they've underlined and annotated it. My Sarah friend who rejected me, lent me a book, a seriously heavy economics text, and I delighted in these underlined passages explaining how we are all fucked with little pencil notes like 'why?' written next to them.

My second favourite thing, is trying to reverse engineer why a friend told me to read a book. Because it is not uncommon for this to be completely obscure.

Having these thoughts, and hitting patches where I was sufficiently alienated from the characters, I began to make notes to amuse myself, reading the narrative as a writer rather than a reader. Trying to predict where the story would go, which I was accurate at, suggesting that I might be best off abandoning the book.

Then I hit this chapter that introduced a new character. Set in 2014, the character Kate, was in the eyes of narrator Elizabeth, a patch of seemingly greener grass and a possible source of antidote for Elizabeth's malaise. 

Now there's a mechanical influence of an author having to thread a needle with characters like Kate, because obviously Kate serves a function in the plot, she is obviously bad news but the author needs to write from Elizabeth's perspective such that she is impressed, and if you want the most dramatic tension to build toward some payoff, you need to somewhat obfuscate that a character is bad news. James Steerforth comes to mind as having this challenge, David Copperfield needs to plausibly view James as a friend, but his later betrayals need to be plausible as well, Dickens threaded that needle by having James spend all David's money as though it were a favour to David and in some ways it is, David bribes his way into good standing at Salem House, but we as the reader can see James profiting. 

Kate engages in graphic public displays of affection in inappropriate places obliviously sexualising children, she passively aggressively refers to the older parents in their circle by 'your generation' wears upcycled clothing, dies her hair grey and is at the forefront wave of stretching-the-plausibility-of-anachronistic adoption of polyamory with her husband.

The author goes on to depict a scene where Elizabeth asks Kate about open relationships, and Kate boldly declares that she loves to convert people, then I as reader, experience this character of Kate as regurgitating a bunch of received wisdom, canned apologia for polyamory while, like a Christian apologetic movie, Elizabeth simply says her lines in the play that enable Kate to work through the scripted argument.

I scribbled in the margin 'an interestingly uninteresting character.' Here, was a kind of terrarium way of observing a character that in real life, I avoid like the plague, fearing death by boredom. A human that fails the Turing test. A zombie.

My mid-90s sensitivities were tingling - Kate was what we called between '94-'97 'a try hard' she is trying to affect the aesthetic of an interesting person, without doing the thing, she is impressing Elizabeth and I as reader have too much insight into Elizabeth's internal monologue to credit her as a reliable identifier of impressive people.

So I find myself writing 'femme banal' which google tells me the french would actually be 'femme banale' and this is so recent I haven't created a pinterest board for it, nor am convinced the exercise is worth my time, because it would involve me having to save images that by definition, are of uninteresting subject matter - overwhelmingly wannabe influencers, LinkedIn posters, successologists, conspicuous consumers, Chinese youths. 

There's a meta-interest in the workings of my own subconscious, but I actually have this really interesting example in the few pages of this novel that features Kate. Enough to work off of.

The concept of the femme banale is so fraught, I'm not sure I'd talk about it even if I wanted to with a human woman. On top of everything I already regret and make me now feel unsafe to pursue insight from actual human woman friends, and I need to articulate a quick recap - women I feel safe to discuss my sexuality with are overwhelmingly 1) women who are not sexual entities to me, and 2) women with whom our sexual tension is resolved either through dating or rejection.

Now to fall in the first category, the vast majority of my ample friendzone, I would say that being a femme banale is a significant factor. Many women I feel neither sexual intimidation nor sexual attraction with, are because I've done the requisite conversating to know I could never spend a whole Saturday of leisure time with them.

And imagine, imagine for a moment that you were somebody who consciously tried to be interesting who asks banal questions like 'what's good?' 'what's everyone reading?' 'what's everyone doing?' 'what's everyone talking about?' and then you had a conversation with me, about how such questions lead to being very basic, very banal, very obvious...to getting out of a car with 10 pre-whacked snakes on snake whacking day, so confident in your abilities to read the room that you were oblivious that an outlier just caused a paradigm shift by pointing out that whacking day was originally invented as an excuse to beat up the Irish, and that Barry White is disgusted by it, and loves the slither of a smooth sexy lady snake.

There will always be demand for some snake-oil that promises an easy answer to social desirability, furthermore that demand is so sufficient that it is possible to buy that snake oil, rub it on your skin and have other members from the same consumer demand group desperately validate that it is working.

Though on some level I believe disillusionment is good, I generally don't go into conversations with the aim of inducing an existential crisis, complete depersonalisation. It is why for all the Kate's I've met in my life, I generally prefer to smile and nod politely and take my first opportunity to never speak to them again, but of course there's levels to this shit. 

Kate may embody the vanguard iteration of the archetypal "Champagne socialist" that Rob K Henderson rebranded "Luxury Beliefs" that likely are just the symptomatic memes that become associated with the group dynamics of status seeking individuals. Wellness also has an obvious train-wreck character in Brandie, who comes from a more conservative political pole but no less banal, a kind of trad-wife influencer who instead of reciting pseudo-scientific notions of polyamory and communal child rearing, recites pseudo-scientific notions of the power of positive thinking.

All of which, I think boil down to banality being a triumph of desire over the discipline of thought. Exemplars of Plato's hypothesis that "the unobserved life is not worth living."

Now, if femme banale's were absolutely of no value, I'd have no problem discussing the concept with real live actual people and gaining tremendous benefit from dredging up what I unconsciously notice into my conscious and get clues as to how to actually navigate my life in the great project of not mistaking anxiety for strength. 

As Gordon Livingston points out in one of my favorite passages of prose - "[fools] are often capable of useful work." People desperately engaged in the project of controlling what others think of them, are often occupied, quite occupied and that can often function as a sense of stability, which allows others around them like partners and children to live stable lives, they might employ people too. I don't want to go around recklessly blowing up hedonic treadmills so that others are caught in the shockwaves.

Many people's lives are tiger-by-the-tail scenarios and I cannot take responsibility for what I might break. Now maybe under deontology ethical systems I have an obligation to blow up what conceits I might stumble into, maybe even consequentially.

But I literally don't want to talk about these things because, ironic given my first post, for me they are egocentric matters. These are only give-and-take conversation subjects because I am seeking information to help with my life to inform my own autonomy, I'm not trying to give anything back, it is not an indirect way of saying 'I have unmet needs, can you fill them?' or even 'you should fill them' and certainly not 'I am representative of my whole sex and sexual orientation, so I speak with authority about general preferences.'

Conclusion

I don't want to literally talk about my sexuality with my female friends no more, because of the human propensity to strawman, because of the human phenomena of Goodhart's law, because of human difficulties with communication in general.

It's a rather bleak notion to be entertaining, but it is based on a loss of confidence in the modal person's ability to identify authority, and to distinguish it from non-authority.

I am the world's leading expert in what I am attracted to, that doesn't necessarily mean I possess the expertise to articulate what is unintelligible and communicate it with a shared understanding of meaning. I am not an authority at all on what is generally attractive, I have no idea. 

Something I know very well about myself, is that while attraction is in some ways necessary, it is attachment that accomplishes both necessity and sufficiency. 

I simply don't like feeling depressed, so let me conclude with a concrete example: not me, certainly not me, but some guy tells a female friend he is 'sapiosexual' a term used by morons who think they mean they are 'attracted to intelligence' while clearly not understanding what 'eschew obscurantism' means, the female friend starts reading books, and not just any books but 'Infinite Jest' and 'Blood Meridian' and James Joyce's 'Ulysses'.

What a bleak fucking scene, two ships, piloted by morons failing to collide with each other in the night. Just a complete failure of subtext.

In Memorium: Lebreaving Los Lakers

 As at writing, it seems pretty much confirmed that Lebron James has no place on the Los Angeles Lakers roster. Also at writing it appears clear that Lebron intends to play even yet more seasons of basketball in the NBA, but does not have a destination. 

I want to take a moment to reflect on this departure though, as one of those moments where a cloud stops obstructing a sun and you hadn't even realised just how chill it had become. Lebron and the Lakers were not a dangerous pairing in any competitive sense, they were a dangerous pairing in an anti-competitive sense.

Tune into Angry Old Hoops youtube channel any day of the week for the past three years, and you'll see the receipts of not only a sustained anger in an elder basketball fan, but an old billionaire lumbering around a court, blowing on his hands who need the laws of basketball suspended to play in the actual game and is most animated when complaining to a referee.

Lebron is not like any other name that gets tossed into the largely academic 'greatest of all time' debates, virtually all the other candidates suited up for one team, the exceptions being Kareem Abdul Jabbar who played for the Milwaukee Bucks and won a championship with them before going to the Lakers and winning four more, and Michael Jordan who after his second retirement where he became part-owner and manager of basketball operations for the Washington Wizards suited up for them before retiring permanently. But Bill Russell, Tim Duncan and Kobe Bryant played their whole careers for the Celtics, Spurs and the Lakers respectively.

Lebron played 7 years for the Cleveland Cavaliers before going to play for the Miami Heat for like 4 years, then went back to Cleveland for 4 years before heading to the Lakers for 8 years, his longest consecutive stint at any one club.

And the merging of Lebron and the Lakers I think was a particular disaster. I'm sure the Lakers organisation had excuses, they needed a marquee name to restore their relevance after struggling to rebuild post Kobe Bryant etc. but at the point at which they acquired Lebron, Lebron was a known quantity, a guy that basically needed a US mens Olympic calibre team to compensate for his propensity to choke away fourth quarters. 

He'd had a great fourth quarter, once, which I watched live against the remnants of the Detroit Pistons' Bad Boys II dynasty that had already lost their defensive lynchpin in Ben Wallace, a victory that sent Lebron to his first ever NBA finals where he was swept by the Spurs in 4 games, choking away the opportunity. Then Kobe's Lakers would acquire Pau Gasol and go to three straight finals and win two back to back, Kobe acquiring one more championship than Shaq and falling one shy of Michael Jordan. This milestone of Kobe threatening to become Jordan's true heir was the supposed impetus for Lebron to make 'the decision' an unprecedented level of anti-competitive player collusion to amass talent on a single 'superteam' not of veterans as was the case with the mega-trade that put Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen together on the Celtics right as their championship windows were closing, but three elite talents from the same draft year joining forces in their prime.

Lebron would ride that super team back to the finals, where he would famously choke harder than anyone had ever choked in the finals ever, definitively elevating the previous generation above his own into the superior position when the offcuts of an era - Dirk Nowitzki, Jason Kidd, Shawn Marion and Jason Terry, a team of post season bridesmaids in the Kobe-Duncan decades congealed on the Dallas Mavericks and beat the Miami Heat super team thanks to Lebron James, arguably a candidate for finals MVP then as without his ability to disappear completely in the fourth quarter, Dallas could not have won.

Lebron did then win two championships back-to-back with the Heat, before Tim Duncan as the old guard and Kawhi Leonard as the new guard curb stomped Lebron's one and only chance to three peat like Kobe, Jordan and Russell had. 

So Lebron cut and ran from the superteam of his own construction, back to Cleveland because in possibly his greatest basketball move ever, his abandonment of Cleveland for Miami had resulted in the Cavs drafting Kyrie Irving one of the most skilled point guards ever. Lebron would also have elite rebounder Kevin Love join the Cavs for his second super team, and would lose a bunch of NBA finals to the Golden State Warriors, winning one in the midst there. Irving would desert Lebron before Lebron would leave Cleveland for the Lakers, but that's the potted history of the known quantity Lebron was.

Lebron was capable of winning your team a championship, if he was surrounded by the top tier talent to insure against his crumbling when you need him. You need someone to make that big play in the final moments, whether it was a Ray Allen, a Chris Bosh, a Kyrie Irving or Kevin Love.

And so the disaster happened. 

Here I am going to assert two premises:

1. The NBA has a vested interest in saying that the greatest person to ever play basketball is currently playing in the NBA.

2. The NBA has a vested interest in the Los Angeles Lakers having at least a post-season, and hopefully a deep post-season run.

Combining Lebron James with the Lakers gave Lebron incredible leverage, incredible influence over the modern NBA. For basketball fans, it was quite literally the worst possible combination ever. The conclusion that follows from my premises is a bizarre double negative - the Lakers cannot fail and it cannot be Lebron James' fault.

Lebron was perfectly positioned to drive the NBA from pure sport towards pure theatre, forcing the NBA to make the Lakers a babyface and any team they played a heel. 

The Lakers impressive lead in free throw attempt discrepancy is not a matter of opinion, just counting, often hundreds of times greater than the next team. It produced the epic 'complete crap' rant from a coach of the Toronto Raptors who was so incensed by the refs exclusive use of whistles for the Lakers that he said if it was already decided that the Lakers were winning tonight, they could have told him and they wouldn't have bothered to show up.

And documentarians like Angry Old Hoops have collated the receipts and uploaded them night after night to youtube. Lebron is allowed to travel, Lebron doesn't have to play defence, if Lebron uses his forearm to completely dislodge a defender, that's a defensive foul on the defender, if anyone touches Lebron on the drive, that's a defensive foul, if Lebron travels then it doesn't count, if Lebron carries then it doesn't count, if Lebron passes the ball to Austin Reeves and Reeves dribbles down the court charges the lane and scores then Lebron gets an assist on his statline and so on and so on.

The entire NBA institution suddenly exists to prop up a tired old billionaire as a viable all star. Again it isn't opinion, just counting. Lebron often will get 12 of his points in 'garbage time' for some reason he is still on the court when the game is clearly lost or clearly won having every offensive play run through him even though nobody else cares anymore.

When the Lakers make it to the post season and suddenly any team they play is being really serious, and the refs are behaving like professionals because people are watching the game and your team having to play 4-on-5 defense because Lebron is too unfit to run back and help, and if he does make it back he isn't any help because he can't move his feet or raise his arms anymore, and the Lakers get swept or gentleman-swept in the first round, year after year, by the Denver Nuggets or the Minnesota Timberwolves or pretty much anyone bar the Houston Rockets, then it can't be because the Lakers have an old billionaire who needs the minutes, and he needs the play to pad his stats out, but is a defensive liability and can no longer play offense unless the refs suspend the rules of basketball for him, it cannot be his fault which means Darvon Ham needs to be fired, Russel Westbrook needs to be traded, D'Angelo Russell needs to be traded, Anthony Davis needs to be traded.

The Narcissistic project that is prosecuting Lebron's "goat" case, has been enabled to a terrifying extent by his being embedded in the Lakers, the largest media market in the NBA by far. The defacto control Lebron appeared to have over the organization up until the Buss family sold their control of the franchise to a more sober billionaire, I think had a profoundly negative effect on the NBA which in turn has had a profoundly crazy-making effect on people who want to watch the game and see good basketball.

There is a clip of Charles Barkley on inside the NBA from a few years back, complaining about why they have to talk about the Lakers, pointing out that the Lakers were currently 10th in the Western conference and talking about them made as much sense as talking about the 10th place Washington Wizards (or something) in the Eastern conference, a team I can't recall, because nobody has to talk about them.

Just multiply that out to pretty much every day of an NBA season up until the Lakers got knocked out of the postseason typically in the first round. You had to hear about Lebron every day, all day, as he racked up bullshit longevity milestones and meaningless events like the first father and son duo to play in the NBA (and on the same team, what are the odds? incredible if literally nobody in their right mind would ever draft Bronny James, officially statistically the worst person to ever play modern basketball - there was a 46 year old who played two games for like the Provedence Profilactics back in the 1960s who is the all time worst player back when a coach could literally decide to play and nobody would demand a refund for their 2c ticket to see Provedence Rhode Island play Palookaville Nova Scotia)

The actual NBA where athletes compete in the game of basketball to win it all got condensed down to a month and a half of the postseason the past three years. It was like "oh look the Denver Nuggets sent the LA Lakers packing in the first round, now we can finally talk about the Nuggets, the Mavericks, the Wolves, the OKC Thunder, the Celtics, the Heat, the Bucks, the Cavs, the Knicks...you know, all the teams actually playing good basketball with a hope of making it to the second round of the NBA playoffs.

And it wasn't even that, because Lebron would also just create drama, so we could still hear about Lebron and the Lakers every day. Like that year he pretended he was considering retirement, only to appear at the ESPYs wearing a pearl necklace and declare he wasn't going to retire, or when he is putting his podcast cohost JJ Reddick forward to replace his coach Darvin Ham and forcing the Lakers to draft his son.

Lebron was a sickening disaster, and the Lakers share a blame for prolonging the deletorious effect he has had on the NBA by his example. I think Lebron knows he fades into irrelevance about 2 weeks after his retirement. An article will be written and published somewhere days after his retirement questioning his legacy, while a fluff piece of bullshit stats nobody cares about will farewell Lebron on both the ESPN, NBA and 'Inspiredbyhoops' Youtube channels. Someone though will be liberated to point out that Lebron achieved less than Kobe with twice the help in twice the time, and from there all the comparisons will diminish in favour. 

There is some residual drama in where he lands, and he may find nowhere suitable, his family now based in LA and chatter about his best prospects being some kind of semi-homecoming to Miami or Cleveland. Cleveland seems unlikely to me, because they are dark-horse contenders. I don't see any contender actually wanting Lebron James believing that people in the know, must know, by now, that Lebron is actually dead weight on a roster. 

That leaves non-contenders that might benefit from selling a bunch of jerseys and merch to Lebron fanboys. Maybe he would consider the symbolism of finishing his career with the Washington Wizards where Jordan did his farewell tour, again a big nostalgic cashgrab, moreso on the Wizards part than Jordan who does not need more cash because he has his shoe sales, something Lebron does not have. The Wizards would also put Lebron close to the person he most resembles in legacy - Donald James Trump. But again, I think now Lebron is down to his last great hope being a kind of geriatic Harlem Globetrotters on the Golden State Warriors, a team he can uber to from his LA residence. 

But I can see that not panning out either, and James having to retire in humiliation this off-season sooner than recognize that he is likely worth less to any team, than what Russell Westbrook has been forced to accept as a result of Lebron's failed superteam 3. Extra humiliating because 2 seasons ago he could have had a final swansong season at the Lakers and everybody would have been happy. He couldn't do that though because he knows if he exits with only 4 rings, his memory will fade faster and farther than Kobe's ever will.

I Don't Want to *Talk* About It 1/2: Fragile Egocentrism

Disclaimer:

So relatively speaking, I've been on a tear on this blog, my most active since like the first I don't know, 7 years of blogging. There were periods of my life where I posted like once a day, I'd say the average dropped to like once a month and the accumulation of unfinished drafts...

Anyway, 'nobody likes a meta-blog' or something to that effect from nemesis John is ringing in my ears, but in my recent exuberance I may have assumed a kind of familiarity that doesn't exist or isn't earned and have been neglecting to properly flag or disclaim my own mental short-hands for concepts I'm grappling with.

Suchly, this post is no exception (nor are their exceptions) that I am some guy in terms of qualifications, and I am most often making shit up with no soundness, validity or rigour. Please keep that in mind, I mean sound and valid concepts like 'bullying' 'gaslighting' and 'narcissism' as determined through processes like research and field testing often get diluted and skunked anyway, and I don't anticipate any of my neologisms taking off, but I just wouldn't want it to start with me, writing confidently and impressing upon someone that I grasp something, when the reality is that I am only ever grasping often desperately for a hypothesis to go out and test myself, or that fits the facts of only the very narrow window of my experience.

Onto the meat.

Darwin's Gifted Children

I like Dr. Todd Grande's breakdowns of, most often, true crime cases that involve some psychological dysfunction on multiple parties accounts. This morning on my way to the shops I listened to a particularly grisly case involving the conviction of murder for a 9 year old child. I'm not going to link here, it is pretty bleak.

Its also the extreme example of how helpless we are as a species, even a society. The low hanging fruit of clinical psychology practitioners is to ask about a patient's parents and early childhood experiences. This in turn is a kind of social occupation that exists in a process whereby we allow eggs to fall off a shoot and regularly crack, then we have a job that slaps a band-aid on the cracks.

What I'm getting at, is basically it is unworkable to create something like a parenting-license, where humans are prohibited from having children until they can demonstrate a level of competence. Biology works against us as do our moral intuitions, I believe rightly, that don't want a state that dictates who can have children and when and how many and who with.

We also have access to this counterfactual in the very civilization and societies we live in that show that the impact of inept and incompetent parenting is not an existential threat to society. 

Here then, is not the brilliance of parents, (well maybe some), but the brilliance of children.

This is really the thesis of evergreen book "The Drama of the Gifted Child" that predates "gifted" as it is employed today to describe academic potential. The gift in this context is the way a child can adapt to the circumstances of its family, a process that produces drama in response to drama, a performative empty adult that has survived childhood by becoming who they need to be to survive their own parents, rather than become themselves.

As such, the book skews heavily to the gift of appeasement - a child recognises the conditional nature of their parents love, and the corresponding conditional nature of parental anxiety, and appeases the parents they rely on by becoming who their parents are comfortable with them being. Basic behaviorism or reinforcement.

But (and my memory is not good enough to recall if this is a specific example) there may be another response particularly for children whose parents neglect them that isn't appeasement (or self-neglect to go along with parental needs and thus get rewarded) and that is to become ego-centric, or simply adapt to neglectful (and perhaps even hostile) parenting by becoming parent to themselves.

This is what I'm positing, I'm speculating as a kind of fragile egocentrism. A brilliant, amazing, intuitive response a child can adapt in order to survive their childhood - physically, nutritionally, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, financially etc. any combination of those.

What I am picturing is a child who learns they cannot rely on their parents to fulfill their needs. They have to advocate for themselves, they have to "lean in" and hustle and grind. They have to hunt and gather resources.

This is a fucking amazing thing our biology is capable of. The kid that walks themselves to the library and entertains themselves on a rainy day afternoon. The kid that aportions to themselves a disproportion of teacher's attention because they need it like the other students don't.

It is also, hopefully obviously, a very tragic brilliant thing that we can do. There is a degree of moral-hazard in having this risk-smoothing biology that allows bad couplings to produce beautiful children. It means that what is naturally selected is gifted children, likely because for most of human history there just was no such thing as birth control, and what isn't selected for extinction is attachment theory where we gravitate toward partners who will replicate familiar suffering. That is where IMO we are stupidly, rather than brilliantly adapted.

What Got You Here Won't Get You There

This is the name of another book, I have it sitting around somewhere but not within my eyeline so I can't read the author and I've already expended as much energy typing this as the google search would have taken.

It's almost in that category of books you don't have to read because it is all in the title self-help like "feel the fear and do it anyway" and "He's Just Not that Into You" but not quite, you probably can get 90% of the value from a blurb so here's mine:

The book is about the diminishing returns of our innate strengths, and the Peter Principle which states that everyone will be promoted to their level of incompetence which has been robustly tested and is generally regarded to be real. Your career will stall when the thing that "got you here" begins to work against you preventing you from getting any further it won't "get you there."

So if your career has been based on speaking confidently and commanding attention, eventually you will rise to a level of responsibility where you need to become cautious, conscientious because the stakes are too high to just take big swing after big swing for example. Or if you've risen through the ranks because you produce high quality work thanks to your attention to detail and work ethic, you will eventually be promoted to a role where to scale up your strengths you need to become sociable, patient, understanding.

Okay so that's basically the book, and it has some advice and things you can do to get over this hump in a career, but the first step is to acknowledge the problem.

What I would guess is not unique to the child who has to remain egocentric to survive childhood and their family of origin, is that not just in work but all applications this begins to work against them in adulthood. 

The simple reason being, not everyone is their parents. Now if we take a longer term view of history, going back to the majority of human civilization which is like 6,000 years, so 10 seconds to midnight compared to human history, but when your parents were dirt farmers, and gave birth to you and your sixteen siblings, nine of whom died by age two, you grew up to be a dirt farmer working on your family plot so whatever adaptation you made to survive childhood among your extended family (nuclear families are a very recent thing) it probably largely applied to your adulthood too. So if you needed to be an egocentric child to glom onto a competent aunt or uncle and get some much needed resources off them where your parents came up short, likely nothing much changed by the time you were thirty and the previous generation were 43. 

Hence, its probably not natural to proactively reconfigure in the complex economy we now live in, where people hit 22, have largely not become parents themselves and are moving to a share house for the final 5 of 7 magical years it takes to complete a three year degree before your first warehouse job and moving back in with your parents. (Also very recent, it used to be possible to become an adult by 21 for most people within living memory)

Bringing me to the thing I'd rather shout into forgotten but not defunct web 1.0 than talk about with the people most effected by it - fragile egocentrism.

Why not "Vulnerable Narcissism"?

Because, despite their being a 'healthy narcissism' present in most functioning adults, an ability to see themselves as something of unique value and seek validation by asking for things, applying for things, generally advocating for themselves so they don't just wither and die in endless reflection about their own insignificance - Narcissism is a thing, and specifically that thing is a personality disorder so it has a highly negative valence - basically we think of villany, of abusers etc. these are the images evoked for me at least, when someone uses 'narcissism' 

Secondly, I'm in no position to diagnose or misdiagnose anyone with narcissism. It may well be that what I am talking about is completely overlapping with 'vulnerable narcissism' but I have no expertise with which I could determine that. 

So I want to break down specifically what I don't want to literally talk about:

Egocentrism

Here's how I usually explain it: say you want a romantic partner, or you want to fill a job position. So you create in essence an ad to say I'm available.

The challenge we face, that force us to think or suffer, is that people will swipe-to-match our dating profile that would make good partners, but also people who will make terrible partners. Both broad groups of people "want" to have a relationship with us, but one will punish us in fulfilling their wants, whereas the other will reward us in fulfilling their wants.

The one that punishes us, I assert, will likely be highly egocentric. They want to be seen with us, they want our attention, they want our validation, they want to fuck us. To be lowly egocentric, they will want to connect with us, they will want to learn us, they will want us to enjoy sex with them as they would enjoy sex with us. They want a reciprocal give-take win-win relationship where ideally the line between giving and receiving will be blurred.

Same-same with filling a job opening, you will have applicants that simply want the job because of the benefits it can accrue to themselves, they want the income, they want the title, they want access to a social life, they want to dispose the income on goods and services they also want...but they may have very little interest in doing the actual role and will make for a terrible employee. But there will be other candidates who may want all of the above, but also to do the role, to produce a good or service, to take pride in the work and form a mutually beneficial employment arrangement.

Again I am going to assert, that if investigated a reliable predictor of good and bad job applicants will be the level of their egocentricity.

Now again with John's words echoing in my mind "meta-blogging...meta-blogging...meta-blogging..." take this very post for example - I am thinking about my audience, choosing this medium because it is active, rather than passive, a party that might benefit has to read on and can quit at any time, it's also impersonal I'm not confronting someone with "I think what is holding you back is your egocentricity" I leave that self-evaluation up to the reader, whereas an egocentric approach to this subject would be to not only confront someone with my impression of them, but to do so because their egocentricity bothers me and me alone. 

I don't believe in purely selfless acts, I wouldn't go that far. I just actually see it as win-win if I can give someone a piece of information that can in someway, lessen their suffering and in doing so, my own is.

What I would wish to make painfully clear is that I don't feel it necessary, warranted or constructive to attribute malice to this egocentricity. I am trying to point to an incompetence, the same as having salad in one's teeth, a procedural step is often missing that others possess to the level of an unconscious-competence or 'instinct' or 'intuition' and I believe can be built by anyone with practice.

This brings me to...

Fragility

A vending machine technician is servicing a machine. A resident of the building is telling the technician her opinion of the policy that the machines do not issue change. 

This is a banal egocentric exchange. The complainer is just demonstrating an incompetence of insight - what I call outsight. Their opinion is very much egocentric - sometimes they don't have exact change, its a hassle for them. They either have to buy more than they want or go without, or go to extra effort to break notes into exact change. These are legitimate grievences based on legitimate preferences, but the technician occupies a position where she can politely write it up for the person, but very probably little else. They are not in a position to change the policy, nor may they understand the policy by which to offer explanation and apology to the complaining consumer. 

They likely have no clout.

Now this example I have adapted from a real world scenario, where the complainer also has the first-hand experience of doing cold calling on behalf of the government. A not uncommon scenario for them to face at work, was to have a member of the public relay a message for the then prime-minister. 

Here then enters the fragility. This person had a personal experience with which they could relate to a vending machine vendor. The idea that the leader of the government of a nation had an office in the corner of a call center, where we could go tap on their door and say "some guy asked me to tell you Prime Minister, that he thinks you're a cunt and not to call at dinner time and he isn't going to vote for you because you fucked up the whole country by letting all those immigrants in."

Then I feel, to de-centralise our ego from this experience and generalise it to a fellow human being and be like "oh yeah, as if the technician can walk into the board meeting and say 'some lady thinks your vending machines should be stocked with ample change because it would be more convenient for her and I guess we can just absorb the additional logistical expense, security expense and incidences of vandalism to deliver that level of convenience.' how foolish of me, that's so annoying, just like when random members of the public tell me to tell the Prime Minister or latest minister to appear in the papers with an expense scandal something."

Right it should be an "uh huh" moment, and not an existential threat, which is how I've had others report the effect of any mention of their egocentricity come across. Perhaps one of the most publicly documented examples is in the 2002 documentary "Comedian" (spoiler, the documentaries climax is Jerry Seinfeld meeting with Bill Cosby) the doco follows two comedians, one being Jerry as he retires his material and painstakingly builds up a new set, you know, you remember his new stuff. The other is Orny Adams, who is an up-and-coming comedy prospect. Orny appears in several scenes, notably an appearance in from memory, Toronto, where on stage he reacts (in 2002 Youtube was barely a thing, let alone "reaction" video content) to a bad review of his act in the Toronto Star.

Afterwards, a veteran comedian, I can't recall who, gives Orny the blunt feedback that basically he needs to stop being fixated on himself and make the audience laugh. This exchange upsets Orny, but gives his agent/manager sufficient courage to take a break from enabling Orny and says something like "I don't disagree with anything he said." 

Another go to example for me, is Derren Brown's breakdown of a scene from 'L'illusionist' a 2010 animated feature:

"Magicians I think [need to] make the performance about something else other than just 'look how clever I am look, look at what I can do' which is the mistake this otherwise technically brilliant magician is making in this and the reason why his audience is so small and why the kid is just only interested in how the tricks done because ultimately then that's that's all that's left isn't there"

Like when I consider how fucking valuable this feedback is, it can literally 180 the direction of someone's life from unmitigated disaster to realised self-worth, it is devastating to encounter this brilliant gifted child who in part or wholly raised themselves gatekeeping the adult's ability to function as a free human in society. 

This is the fragility and it's a death-spiral to couple fragility with egocentricity. 

Why I don't want to literally talk about it

In brief: incompetence and impotency. Like I have tried to talk about it in the past, and it came very close to just blowing up a friendship.

There's a saying that doesn't apply here: "If this is what it feels like to be wrong, I don't want to be right."

From my perspective, limited though it is, what it feels like to be egocentric as an adult, is mostly bad. These people are suffering. 

But what it feels like to be right, is in this case incredibly scary. 

So the above saying doesn't work, because this is something you say with a nose full of cocaine and a prostitute wearing your wife's old high-school uniform while she is in a clinic having her post-partum depression treated. It's not like it's actually ever wise to be wrong, but there's a hedonic payoff in the moment that makes the saying cogent, if fundamentally false.

I would guess, as a lay person with no capacity to know that having unreliable parents is the kind of existential threat that can justify a classification of trauma. In this way perhaps there's some aptitude to identify thinking of others, perspective taking etc. as an existential threat, causing stress, post-trauma; and that it is disordered basically once one becomes legally and financially independent from parents or primary carers.

There may also be an aptitude in phenomena like "scarcity cultures" Melbourne youtuber klaize has a video on the theory behind the "greedy Chinese" stereotype which cites a bunch of memes like Chinese appearing people loading up on single use plastic bags in produce sections of grocery stores for example. He cites research using economic games with children that from memory suggests a kind of intergenerational trauma arising from the famines caused in China by Mao's reckless and irresponsible social experiments that characterised his control of the People's Republic of China. 

Now, to suggest that the infants are experiencing trauma I suspect might be a stretch, though as adults they may develop anxieties learning oral histories, but it seems a culture can also, I'm going to say 'collapse' into egocentricity - a 'fuck you I got mine' arising from actual, or anticipated scarcity (as is likely happening now that every moron is parroting predictions of 50% unemployment in the future and then acting like it isn't completely fucking insane that anyone is enthusiastically charging toward such a destabilisation of human civilization. This is also, simply in addition to all the fucking news coverage for 10-15 years about housing becoming unaffordable, and young people not being able to ever own their own home, and at the same time, journalists on the public broadcaster basically masturbating on live TV over the prospect of rate cuts from the central bank pushing property prices ever closer to the moon.)

I don't want to talk about it, because there's a fundamental difficulty in discussing it intelligibly, let alone intelligently. 

I binge watched House M.D. one time, finding its formulaic episodes following A, B and C plots on the same predictable beats episode after episode, season after season. For those who no longer recall House, or terrestrial television, Dr. House worked in the diagnostics department of Princeton Teaching Hospital in New Jersey, his job was to figure out combinations of weird symptoms and patients resistant to treatment that defied the run-of-the-mill presentations.

A guiding principle for the diagnostics, is that you are always going for one condition to explain all the symptoms. So like if someone presents with yellowed skin, abdominal pain and an ear ache, you don't want to explain all those symptoms with three conditions if there's one that can explain all of them. So I don't have the medical knowledge to come up with a valid example, but let's say "Dave's syndrome" explains all three and is treated with massage, that's better than "jaundice, appendicitis and ear infection."

But this is what I've found, so let me try and noodle it a bit here - egocentricity is an adaptive response to early childhood adversity, the parents, guardians, carers aren't doing their bit so the child steps up; that becomes maladaptive in adulthood where (dysfunctional economy aside) your peers are expected to rely on each other, not their parents. So that's (1) and this egocentricity co-exists with a background level of existential dread, like being cutoff or something so (2) is that someone who is egocentric also doesn't like to hear, let alone be told they are 'egocentric.'

Which means (3) that we can't talk intelligently about this perfectly reasonable, in many ways admirable response to childhood adversity because to acknowledge it is somehow to send someone back there.

My greater problem

Is not only do I not want to literally talk about it anymore, with anyone, I don't want to watch it. I don't want to see it. I don't want to be around when it happens.

It's painful to watch someone say "buy this thing about me" with, and that is a crucial "with", no consideration as to why anyone else should but that thing, and that thing about you, and what they get out of it in return for what me gets out of it.

It's this awful thing where I cannot resolve the pain of caring about someone with fragile egocentricity, so I wind up having to avoid them so I don't have to exist in that place where a dysfunctional adult hurts themselves, and I feel bad for them.

Dream, Dream, Dream, Dreamy Dream Dream Dream...

 Dreams for me are an opportunity to experience rapid memory decay, dreams and people's names. I definitely get afflicted by the Baker/baker paradox for some reason seeing someone's name in writing helps, but I suspect only with social media because it is about making meaningful associations. Names are seldom meaningful, they are more often commonplace.

Dreams for me I suspect decay in retrieval for the same reason, but I do have a sense that some of my dreams are more vivid than others.

I recently dreamed vivid dreams of people I know, and they've all decayed to about 10% of what I feel was the experience. As usual with my dreams, the plot was a series of non-sequiturs, as such remembering part of the dream does not enable me in any way to reconstruct the whole of the dream.

My original, sexist, conceit was that it might be amusing to try and hold the people that appeared in my dreams accountable for my dreams and call it "my feminine side" don't think I'm backing away because I've realised that it's sexist. I assume it is, I've only had one person ever ask me to explain what I was doing in their dream and they were female, but that is not a sample that rises anywhere near to statistical significance. In fact it is more accurate to say that women are very unlikely to hold a person to account for an action in their dream.

No the reason I'm abandoning that conceit is that I wouldn't even know where to begin.

Rule 1 of Dream Interpretation

I will not answer for my own unconscious (subconscious in the US) just like a law court wouldn't. I mean a court of law might hold me accountable for being unconscious, but not in regards to things like malicious intent or criminal culpability.

For example, I was once accused of saying "I want a divorce..." in my sleep, or something to that effect (I've never been married or even engaged) and I've been told I've said shit in my sleep and I know I can have night-terrors that result in short term hallucinations - usually of a rodent or snake being in the bed - so It's plausible I said something in my sleep.

It's also plausible to me, that given the mystery of dreaming, my dream might have had nothing to do with what I might have said in my sleep, but I do like to think that dogs when they are dreaming are having somekind of visual experience internally that they are barking at and twitching their paws toward.

I had no such dream of going through a seperation, and I recall dreaming that I was asking someone if they "parli italiano?" (do you speak Italian) and as the most memorable verbal interaction, it seems the likeliest candidate for what I may have muttered aloud, and someone listening for a meaningful english phrase might have got some variation of "I...anna...vorce" or maybe "api...ation" or something.

This was interesting for me, but in the moment I answered honestly, and most relevantly that I could recall having no such dream, do not feel any such sentiment and as such felt obliged to offer no explanation for what I may or may not have said while unconscious.

So that basically is the rule, and I feel it should be respectfully observed where one has the presence of mind to do so. Of course, it is another level of absurdity to be asked to answer for someone else's unconscious impression of you.

That said

Clearly dreams are not entirely random. I have never dreamed of being Xaphod Beeblebrox Intergalactic President with Two Heads. They can be untethered from reality, but never that untethered.

The usefulness of dream interpretation for me, is in identifying stressors that we may be denying in our waking lives.

They have helped me discover, that actually I need to do some minor confrontation to say something will be delivered late, or I don't want to take on some responsibility, or do some activity that is only nominally fun.

They've never helped me figure out I'm gay or right handed or anything useful like that.

Miami Sunset 198X

Is what I'm calling the first dream, so this is as much as I can remember.

I was in the car with her, asking her questions when we simply ran out of road and started driving on the water. It wasn't as clean as you might be picturing, I knew this was a dumb thing to do, I was a passenger forced to accept this new reality.

I was talking to her, trying to ask her questions, we were bobbing over the swells, coasting on momentum. Her job was to keep the wheels straight as possible, and I pointed out to her a couple that had shot past us at greater velocity in a modern 4WD and had flipped a wheel causing them to capsize and sink in the shallows, I believe they managed to push off the sand bank by turning a wheel hard enough to roll all the way over, but then they were kind of adrift.

We kept heading straight, toward like some mangroves or something and I thought we could make it, and I had no care for the car. This was obviously a stupid way to travel, but our convo was not about the regrettable decision to drive out into the water. 

I was asking her questions, questions about her.

The dream just ended, I think the action may have moved to another location, a different cast. Above is all I can recall now.

Now I actually think the metaphorics are all pretty congruent. This dream was a pretty good tone poem of the relationship I have with this person. In terms of feel, there's the instability, but it isn't a frightening instability, a familiar instability. There were oddities like left-hand drive, but everything about where I was was aesthetically pleasing, the only exception being the 4WD in many ways a symbol of where I am. We were riding in like a Datsun or Renault 70s type car, or a muscle car from Street Rod II like a Corvette even. I don't know I was in the interior. 

I think it is a dream about longing and impermanence. A very vivacious dream, it had a positive valence, feeling more like Waverider on the N64 than a watery death. She would be steering, I was the passenger. 

I can't recall the sequencing of my dreams, but it's possible the underlying stimulus, the prompt was the first of the dreams I had about her, a different her that the her from this dream compares herself to, for fear that I would compare her to her, and look where we are.*

*I guess I am holding someone accountable for what they do in my dreams.

Don't Mention the Exile

I'm going to smush together the decayed memories of two quite vivid dreams I had here, because they are very similar to the point of being a 'recurring' dream. 

The first's stimulus was obvious to the point of being conscious, but not a lucid dream. Red Letter Media published one of their "Re:View" features on "Wet Hot American Summer" and I watched it, and "Wet Hot American Summer" was originally introduced to me by her, it has a strong association.

What I'm also conscious of, is that while a seasonal cue to dream of her should be between August and October somewhere, where she ended our friendship in response to my conduct, I feel as though I often have the seasonal activation months early, and can forget about it completely in the time of year where events transpired.

Anyway, in the first dream she was just there, wearing green flannel and just wanting to catch up and discuss all the things we used to discuss like whether "Wet Hot American Summer" is comedy gold or not, and I got this sense of momentum from her speech that the friendship ending had never happened, but I was very much conscious of it, and my recollections of this dream end with me confronting "are we not going to talk about the ostracism?" 

I recall waking up asking myself questions I hadn't for a long time, wondering if I should actually seek to confront this person. Then I put together the stimulus with the dream, and didn't think much more about it.

Then a few nights later, a youtube music playlist worked it's way to Kelis' "I hate you so much right now" and I was reminded of her because I think she told me that Pharrell produced that for Kelis and she liked it more than "Milkshakes" and we were probably discussing it back then because I prefer "Trick me" to "Milkshakes" but we can all agree, Kelis is great and we're glad it happened.

That night I dreamed of her intruding into my life again, this time she tapped on a window like she'd just spotted me walking by after more than a decade of estrangement, and again, the rage was there that she wasn't acknowledging that I'd been held irresponsible for over a decade, for my actions.

Competing with that rage, is the desire to realise the undoability of my grief. So I kind of just followed along, hung out and tried to enjoy her company. At some point I was left talking to her dad, whom I've never met, so he was just what I pictured - a Conservative pro-free markets, pro-Neoliberalism white dude from the wealthy side of town, I had to listen to him exposit about himself to me as we walked to the local footy oval that was being torn down for renovations or a rebuild or something to build some new state-of-the-art facility, and I expressed some remorse that another piece of heritage was being demolished, and he was making arguments to the effect that it had fallen into disuse and the old had to make way for the new.

I pointed to like this brick art-deco feature and said "I'm going to miss that" and got the concession from her dad that he too would miss it.

Anyway, I woke up, kind of stressed that I'd dreamed of this same person two nights within a week. If there was something I needed to resolve to make these dreams stop.

Again, tonally these dreams are pretty coherent to me, and it's also fairly easy to explain what stimuli caused them to happen - two abstract associations cropping up thanks to Youtube. 

There's the literal cognitive dissonance I feel at desiring the reconciliation, the forgiveness, and that while I accept and have long accepted what I did that caused me to lose the friendship, it's that the way that was handled was both understandable but cruel and unusual too.

Is there anything to be learned?

In the case of the first dream, the driving on water dream, it doesn't stress me too much. I think I have the opportunity to ask the questions I want to ask because we are friends. Maybe I just need to figure out when and how and what. I think we are aligned as people generally, in wanting healing.

The other is difficult, and all I can think to do is shout it into the internet hole.

The first thing is that rationally I can just accept that what happened, happened and it's not a fucking mystery. I applied stress in a fairly douchey way to a friend at a time when they really needed support.

I've written about it before, but in having the receipts for what I'd done, I was able to really examine my own behaviour that can't be done if its a conversation or something similarly ephemeral. I know in the first 6 months, when the status of our friendship was by communication an ambiguous hiatus, and I was conducting the autopsy of my actions, I felt such shame that trying to read my own writing seemed to bring on hysterical blindness.

At some point, maybe after one or two years though, when rereading my own writing, while some of it remains cringe - largely attributable to nerves I feel, in writing, that I do not have on rereading - I was actually surprised to experience less shame, less cringe, less embarrassment. To find myself experiencing my own behaviours as fairly reasonable and conciliatory.

Now, there's not actually anyone else to blame. The causal chain is one of the easiest to determine in all the times I've blown up my own life in some way. Just clearly some trauma remains unresolved for me.

I want to bury it, or rather have it be an inert chapter in my life. The easiest way would be to talk about it with the offended party, get information that can allow it to reconcile in my mind and stop agitating there, but that is only easiest on paper. 

What was striking about the dream, was that I felt a renewed burst of shame, embarrassment, guilt.

All I can think of as catalyst for that though, is all that remains unacknowledged by me. And it's not something I'd try and reach out to them with anymore. We are thoroughly estranged, to the point that most days I don't think of them at all, they only reappear with certain triggers, that are generally so intermittent as to not be noteworthy, except this recent "Wet Hot American Summer" "Kelis" double feature.

Unsent Letter Nth

I realised late that I liked you. I noticed you complain publicly about your partner, but even then I didn't realise. It became a conscious thought only after your breakup.

I took advice on what to do, and I ignored it. Because at that time, I had my own needs, and what I needed was for your breakup to stick. We were having lucid conversations, I was asking you pointed questions and you were giving me cogent answers, answers you were contradicting.

I was acutely aware there was history there of overlapping partners in a messy way that I didn't want. I wanted to see growth before I risked anything. 

I guess my problem was twofold, I didn't just want but expected growth, I was hoping, not impartially observing and I didn't anticipate my own emotional dysregulation when you didn't grow. 

I suspect, but don't know, in fact I kind of just assumed, that you knew at least enough to be confident I was interested.

I think I wasn't up to being your friend and broke because I couldn't accept the decision you went with. I likely blew up our friendship because it was too stressful for me not to resolve it in some way. I think I did so gracelessly, mostly due to inexperience, but also out of hope that it may turnaround if I just applied enough stress.

In which, I think you deserve credit for resolving it. In many ways it was helpful to me moving on, and enjoying my life.

I just struggle with the finality of it. I think that's what scares me, and haunts me about my lack of control. I've tried in myself, to be a safer person for my friends to blow up at. I don't know if I succeeded.

Inconclusive Like a Dream

I hope that's broad enough to be generally applicable, like how I relate to Jurassic-5's "The Thin Line" ft. Nelly Furtardo or even Mya (her solo hits softer) The nature of my dreams themselves indicate I'm conflicted as to the worthwhileness of a hypothetical reconciliation. I think an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and I would like very much to discover an adequate prophylactic even though, in the decade plus since losing that friendship, I haven't lost another, I'm still scared.

As to whether this exercise has helped, remains to be dreamed.

Out of Warning Signs

At some point, the Victorian Board of Education set as a text a play set in Newcastle about a blue collar worker who had a friend in management, a deadbeat girlfriend and a sister with special needs and the play followed his life basically falling apart.

We had to read the play script, and I think my school even had the budget to bus us to Melbourne to see a theatre company put on a couple of key scenes from the play.

I can't remember the name of the play, I could probably find an archive of set texts for the years I did highschool but it's not important for setting the scene here.

The play was about the deindustrialization of the late 80s that happened in a lot of places. The climax of the play involved the worker grandstanding as he realised he was going to become structurally unemployed, have to put his sister in a home and his girlfriend would leave him and his best friend betrayed him, so he douses himself in petrol and makes this big speech before revealing it was just water and getting arrested or something.

At some point in his speech he says "if the writing was on the wall how come it wasn't read aloud?" and that probably makes an impression on me, because it was this complaint of a type that the obvious was not obvious enough.

I hope, the playwright wasn't meaning it literally in terms of a steelworker being illiterate and so newspapers and P&L statements etc should be read out to people.

Now, where I'm at in terms of navigating "the world" as we call it, is this space where I'm bracing for just a wall of stupid to come crashing down. It's really hard to define, but I think we've been networking stupid up and some of it is obvious - like the flat earth conspiracy community - where not so much new forms but new levels of stupid have been made possible by not just the internet, but social media, algorithms etc.

It's the less obvious stuff. Like, go back to 2004, smartphones aren't quite a thing yet, and if they are only executives use them to email. People are commuting to work driving their Hyundai, with a bowl of cereal between their legs, texting their mum using a numeric keypad on their Nokia to confirm plans for Easter, applying lipstick and listening to talkback radio. This is stupid, and a daily routine. What makes it nefariously stupid though, is that it's reasonably safe. This person stop-starting through peak hour traffic may have increased their chance of having a traffic accident a thousandfold.

But what that looks like, is that when they are driving with their hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel, watching the traffic and doing headchecks and mirror checks, they may only have a 1 in 100,000 chance of having an accident. With their phone, the cereal, the makeup the whole morning routine, their chances of having an accident jump up to 1 in 1,000.

That means this individual can be expected to maintain their morning commute without incident for three whole years. In the meantime, to compound their stupidity, each time they drive dangerously and don't have an accident, they build their confidence that their driving practices are safe. This is likely how someone winds up driving through rush hour with a bowl of cereal between their knees, applying makeup while texting their mum.

Now, we live in a world where reports are being written by nobody, read by nobody, executive summaries are being summarized, people are subbing in statistically generated grammar for thought, simply because they can't tell the difference.

People are potentially already making hiring decisions, where they are like "well I could hire a receptionist, but what if my receptionist could also give me legal, medical and fashion advice..."

And it seems likely to me, that the potential cumulative stupidity we are building up, is likely far far larger than I can imagine.

Now I've steered this in the direction of generative "AI" or LLMs but I suspect my real concern, and the real subject of this post, about writing on a wall and it not being read aloud, has been with us longer in the form of siloing via algorithms. Internet echochambers. 

Its the conundrum of even being able to warn anybody anymore of anything.

So Hard to Describe

I don't think it's a "chicken little the sky is falling" thing, or a "boy who cried wolf" thing even, this is more something sci-fi short story writer Harlen Ellison put his finger on:

You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.

That's from 1993 according to wikiquote. I'm talking about something that has evolved into something more. 

It's sharing a planet with a population for which if you put up a warning sign, the response may be "I didn't think I had to take it seriously, nobody warned me that I should pay attention to a warning sign."

So you put up a warning sign that says "warning: things warned of in warning signs may be real and actual." and then someone with bleeding stumps says "well nobody warned me that the warning about heeding warning signs was something I needed to pay attention to. I thought I could choose to ignore it."

The world we live in seems to have become a little more "Land of do as you please" and a little more "Global Cassandra" where Cassandra is the priestess of Apollo who was cursed by Him with the gift of prophecy but nobody would believe her. As such in Greek classics like the Iliad and Odyssey and plays, she gets all these scenes like "That Horse is full of Greeks that will destroy Troy if you bring them inside the gates" and "Agamemnon your wife Clytemnestra is having an affair and they are going to kill you in the bath and then kill me." and so forth.

A few weeks ago, I was watching a guy present to a group of old people about basically how the "Awokening" has collapsed, that loose cluster of memes and rhetoric that hung about for a decade, accomplished some things, but not what they were intended to. I felt in my waters that the fever broke pretty much in 2024 after Kamala lost the election and it seems to be an insurmountable reckoning that rather than being wrong, the memes were just insurmountably unpopular and grossly unequal. This guy was pretty much doing a post-mortem, very clinically and citing data to serve as proxies for the nebulous thing.

And Bitcoin's value in USD I believe crashed far enough that somebody with their money in an index fund for the past five years will finally have outperformed the bitcoin bubble. It has almost halved in USD since October of last year.

But then there's the Space X IPO, and I still have to hear about "AI" all the time in my contact with educational institutions. In terms of being a Cassandra, it was this depressing moment when I perhaps became truly old, understanding that there is always going to be something.

Like I already was persuaded to accept tentatively the position of moral-progress skepticism, but I was thinking in terms of living memory. Now I'm thinking, moral-progress has a half-life of less than a lifetime. 

And it's not young people, like I don't think the young can really put the thumb on the scale, and people are remaining infantalised longer and longer. It's this strange thing of like, like today the media got details of the agreement signed between Trump admin. and Iran to open up the straight of Hormuz for 60 or 90 days or whatever. And fucking journalists this was their moment to finally suggest that maybe the US had gone and done a debacle. 

I've heard people comment on access-media, both for Disney and the White House, but I think there's something bigger than that at play too. It's like journalism at some point, began to see themselves as diplomats. Or rather, constrained as diplomats, but not just in what they could say, but what they could think.

Like journalists by and large, had to pretend that a President had some kind of strategic interest in the decisions they make. I don't think I want to live in this world where presentable people in good suits sit at desks in big fancy studios on the BBC and ABC and situation room and wherever else who all seem decent and respectable and constantly confused by the news they are reporting.

I think I would prefer to live in a world where a sleazeball ashes their cigarette into a crystal ash tray with dark rings under their eyes and sweaty patches under their arms and they are astonished by nothing that they read because they are a real journalist whose investigations and experience of the world have turned them cynical.

I fucking hate the "Leopards ate my face" meme, it is so improv, alas, it's true, but what I'm saying is that we seem to be living in some kind of world where we have to assume that the people who vote for the face eating leopards party, are the people who will say "I had no idea leopards were dangerous animals that eat people's faces" and then we say "but we told you they were dangerous animals that will eat people's faces, and not only that but they told you they were dangerous animals that eat people's faces and if elected will eat your face AND WE TOLD YOU THEY TOLD YOU THAT." and they say "oh...I just thought you were brainwashed or had some agenda."

That's the scary nature of our times. Some fucking mind bending bullshit where to say "you were told" earns you a "yeah but you didn't tell me you were telling me." or more simply "oh but I was also told something else" and if you are like "so how did you choose?" they are like "I chose what felt good in the moment."