The Shadowman and the Irrationality of Humans

The common understanding is that humans are irrational.  You can leave off the "beings" part.  Instinctual?  Sure, yes.  Emotional?  Mhm.  Logical?  Ehhhhh... sometimes?  Reasonable?  By turns.  The common understanding is that humans are rational.  It's unfortunate that the base assumption is so.  Where it is born, who knows.  My thought is that the seed of the assumption is formed in the assumption that you are a human and you're decisions and behaviors are rational to you and have furthered your survival and existence so if another human exists their behaviors and decisions must be rational too because they are also surviving.  Something along those lines.  It gets reinforced all over the place from every angle and channel of input.  You get it.  You are rational.  Why would you choose to do something that would jeopardize your very existence?  You don't have a death wish.  You are alive!

Humans are irrational.  Please stop building arguments and drawing lines in the sand from the standpoint of echos reverberating from advertisements and observed actions sculpted into frameworks and canned calls and responses and your pasts and your futures.  We are not rational.  Beings?  Sure.  Yes.  Rational?  No.  Rational some of the time?  Sure, yes.  If you want to make it absolute, one or zero, then we are one.  No being or thing is rational all of the time.  Okay, some things are.  Coins are rational.  Geometry is rational.  Math is rational and even when it's irrational it's rational (I think... I knew mathematicians existed and played at the fringes... pretty sure that foggy math is still relatively...  okay, maybe not... you get the point).  Alright, everything is irrational!

In all seriousness, life has been very frustrating trying to understand why events bring out expressions of concern for well being and continued survival in strange ways.  The most recent shooting is not a tipping point, but mumbling to myself while I worked through the day and the following day was telling.  Enter vice and criminality.

When the argument is made that laws have to stay the way they are because the criminal element will find a way to get what they want regardless of what laws are or are not in place and the citizenry must be able to protect itself from this shadow force, I cringe.  That shadow is being cast from the rational mind inside.

Is there a criminal element in the human population?  Yes.  Is that criminal element rational?  Of course not.  The percentage of the human population that makes up that criminal element is extremely visible and equally small.  It skews perception.  How much of that perceived element is gratified and punched up by the echoed reinforcement of  "I am a rational human being and criminals are humans and therefore also rational."  It is incredibly basic.  If you make laws to prevent something from happening or encourage something to happen to promote survival, a lot of humans will see the outcomes, understand mutual survival, and continue to be.  Those same communal laws will be ignored by some humans for all sorts of reasons and interactions and protein chains and chemical reactions.  We are not rational!  As much as you want to believe it.

Let's bring it to weapons. I need to be able to purchase a weapon capable of defending my life against the criminal element.  The rational criminal will find a way to get the weapon they want.  I need to be able to get one capable of answering whatever challenge that may be and limiting my options is sending me to certain harm.  You're flinching away from your own shadow.  Life is insecure.  Life is irrational.  The penalty for your crime is twenty years in prison.  I'm still going to do it.  The penalty for your crime is 40 years in prison.  I'm still going to do it.  The penalty for your crime is 80 years in prison.  I'm still going to do it.  The penalty for your crime is consecutive life sentences.  It's the principle!  The penalty for your crime is death.  You don't understand how much I've been through!  The penalty for your crime - will never be able to influence some humans actions.  That population is a lot smaller than advertised.

So you have to carry a gun because if you were them you would have a gun and you are rational, unlike them, and you follow the law because the law keeps everyone alive and well and they'd have one anyway because that's what you would do.  You have to protect yourself against the irrational ones.  Sometimes it makes me giggle the way people perceive laws because we see their statements about them and wonder how much of their conviction comes from what they've observed and how much comes from the little voices inside their own heads that they mash and thumb down and keep inside because they are reasonable humans doing what's best for human survival instead of slamming the door shut on who they are only to have it pop open a slip with a loud screeeeeeeeaak an inch or two because the bolt didn't quite seat to the strike plate, but the door's hinges are stout.

Getting what you want, when you want it, when you need it, if laws and community prohibit it, is not nearly as easy as television and hearsay and books and articles make it sound.  How many times have you followed an instruction manual to the letter and failed?  How many times have you gone to a holiday office party to be sociable and improve your image and come away exactly the same as you arrived?  How many times have you turned right on a red lit intersection with a dedicated right lane lamp because you were late and the lanes were clear?  How many times did you walk fifteen minutes away from the bar to get a pack of smokes and fire one up on the way back to the bar because they didn't sell them there and disallowed smoking on the premises?  The easy stuff.  The forgivable stuff.

Ramp it up.  Imagine that gas station is thirty miles away.  Imagine that intersection has five cameras pointed at it.  Imagine that party was organized by you and you showed up fashionably late too.  Imagine holding that instruction manual in your hand, closed, as you flipped the switch to "on" and the entire K'nex set whirred, wobbled, and cracked to pieces in seconds.  Getting what you want, when you want it is not an easy task, but it's fun to think hypothetically as a rational human.

"If I were them, I could do that.  I would do that!  If we are to survive we must make sure that if they do that (they are rational because that's what I would do and I am rational) we can stop them."  No, you couldn't.  It's hilarious and frustrating at once.  If I want to do drugs, I will find a way to do drugs!  No, not really.  If it's convenient, why not.  The feeling may pass.  The chemical programming may or may not.  The decision making is tied to the chemicals and past experiences hard coded upstairs.  It may take a while to shift.  It may never shift.  If it's not readily available, fifty one miles is just too damn long to go get it so I'll stew and grind on with my life without it.  The rational addict goes to get it, makes a way, finds someone who knows someone who heard about someone that was seen somewhere once and goes there to meet them for lunch.  The irrational human stumbles on through the next day and the next day and sits down some afternoons to cuss quietly or aloud and does something else with its time until it becomes a little more convenient and sometimes reflects on why its so upset in the first place.  Sometimes it kills itself, sometimes it hurts others, sometimes it decides to drive fifty one miles to ask a question.  Sometimes it decides now is now and another day is another day.

It's guffaw disappointing when the shadowman is invoked as a reason to do or not do something.  The shadowmen are arming themselves, laws be damned; do you want me to die?!  The shadowmen are circulating drugs all over the place; what of the children?  The shadowmen, the shadowmen, the shadowmen!  Without laws keeping step with the threat of the shadows no one is safe!

Yes, no one is safe.  No ones safety is ever guaranteed.  That goes back to when humans had to worry about giant nocturnal multi-legged hunters stealing away their curious young.  People die.  People will be killed.  Someone may murder you.  Someone you know.  Someone you know may murder someone you know.  People find ways to get what they want or need and laws don't stop them no matter how much they have to risk or harm themselves to get it.  The answer isn't lowering the threshold from irrational decision to action.  Raise it.  Otherwise you might as well be trying to fix a hole in a canoe by punching more holes so that everyone is treading water.  If everyone is under threat of drowning we are all safe, right?  Another terrible analogy.  Believing making something proven and observed to be extremely hazardous to other people readily available to everyone to level an imaginary playing field is just flat laughable.

Why are you so afraid of the shadowman?

Who's been whispering in your ear?

How do you not see the upside-down superimposed on what you advocate for and not pause?

We are not rational people.  Hearing arguments bounce back and forth with real ramifications, buoyed by this ghost echo of an assumption of reasonable behavior, it's stupefying.  The invocation of this evildoer for all seasons with no regard for law or just basic basic basic irrational humanness is disheartening.  But we are rational people.  We will survive.



///The Shadow

Move Town

I get so caught up with making the people around me things as a way of saying thanks and payment that I forget to make myself- to do what I want to do because I owe my existence, my here and now, to those people by a currency that will never translate because they don't know fully what they helped me reach escape velocity away from what I saw as an insurmountable margin and I don't view it as penance or clinging to the past or misplaced.  I see it as a continuous consciousness of how tenuous life can be and a ten four toward how the smallest gesture, the smallest show of what someone outside of a relationship might see as pity pence or enabling weakness can actually be a point and moment where you've helped someone's life turn a corner.  It's burdensome to think about and it takes a piece out of myself to do it, but everyone is thanked out of reflex and I feel more comfortable in my own skin, helpless and power filled at once, when I have taken the time to let them know the fact that I am still alive now is not by chance or the grace of a supreme being and is by their taking their time to pitch a penny or several thousand into my hat.  To fool yourself into thinking you've done it by yourself or by chance or by blessing or sheer hard work grind is something I want to make sure I never do.  So maybe it is an anchor.  Maybe it is an unnecessary sacrifice and can be framed as a guilt or a confirmation of sin and imperfection.  A penance.  I don't see it that way and will never come around to that frame of mind.  So much of life is decisions and whether it suits me or not a lot of those decisions happen outside of myself.  I accept that.  So please, accept my outside decision to thank you and the universe outside of myself that you have had a hand, direct and indirectly, in forming.

Once we're clear of that, we can shift focus back to fantasy lands and dreamscapes.  There isn't much more distance to cover and I am happy for that.  Excited for that.  There are times when I feel like every other word is about some future date when the resources are at their correct levels and processes have synchronized and the planets have lined up into something close to a grand cross and if I am twenty minutes in to 5th Element while listening to acid jazz with my heaphones in my key tray and I've already consulted my little sister and am suitably numb mouthed from too many cigarettes and just the right amount to dissuade me from running to the gas station to purchase more and the moon is a waning gibbous on a clear night with rain in the forecast for early before the sun comes up with the option to sit outside with a fire at any point prior barring the anything prior to the immediate because it did not rain the day through at work, where I box myself in to unrealistic expectations as a way to never have to actually execute anything.  If you never pull the trigger, you never have to learn whether or not there is more to learn about what you want to do.  Whatever you have conceptualized is its best and most perfect form.  You never have to translate.  I wanted to have children.  I can have children.  Meet my family!  It's almost like every idea is that part of you other people talk about and love, but if they ever did meet you, the rest of you, they'd screw their nose up and rub their squished shut eyes like they just saw an apple snap loose from a twig and fall up to disappear into the sky.

I get very caught up, but I have not forgotten my own needs.  It eats me out from the inside, but I never forget the gnaw and the sound of it and the feel of it, the blood cough taste of it, nose running, water eyed mechanics of it.  They scream at me.  I'm moving forward as fast as I can.  I swear, I am.  The days disappear swiftly.  The nights are restless, strapped to a mattress.  Fear lurks in corners.  Cats ask questions.  Notes are taken on walls and skin and misnamed folders.  Bite a lower lip and squeal from the top of the foothills of the mountain range, the clouds ahead of the temperature front doing strange things above the peaks and the ground bellowing thunder lake swells and strikes days distant, birds moving town in brunch sky above.  Sip.  Nod.  Please pass the olives.  Cross a leg and scribble onward.



///Sylvan Esso - "Uncatena"

The Year End Look

Never forget that any day you do not think about killing yourself is a pretty damn good day.  Let's run the damage report to begin.  One concussion.  One fractured jaw.  Pretty okay.  What the hell, did we learn?  What is the outlook on this year?  I am afraid of saying "I don't know."  It's all there.  I don't want to sift through it.  Slug through it.  I want to try to take my reference point from the year end look to begin 2015 and see where we go; so let's go!

First of all, caution paid off.  Before the major injury to my face, everything was humming on the hardware.  When you suffer a debilitating injury, a person cannot help slipping into ways to deal with that pain.  No friends were lost and no new real friends were won.  Relationships grew deeper and more sovereign.  The realization that the only person who can take care of you at the bottom line, when bone strikes metal, is you and the only person you can rely on absolutely, the only person you can control with high fidelity is you.  Everyone else are variables.  Your friends will help you and attempt to intercede and interject.  Some who do are tourists.  That is acceptable.  Emotional tourism is a fact of life.

Nice guys finish last, but they finish clean and if that means something to your heart then it is absolutely worth pursuing.  You cannot wear hats that do not fit before they blow off in the wind or constrict the blood vessels in your forehead hard enough to give you a migraine.  Through the incident, I learned that I am a violent person at heart, but the jacket around that bullet is a jacket formed in a forge of love, kindness, emotion and the ability to feel.  Sure, sometimes you feel nothing and sympathy and empathy are things I have to manufacture, but I realized very quickly, unable to eat, laugh, smile, frown, grimace, sneeze or cough, that manufactured or not, however you arrive at it, rage and violence is not the way to go.  Thinking back on it, had I lashed out and taken the governors off of myself and won the day instead of trying to talk it through and getting cold cocked, I would be sitting at home afraid to go out at night, worried that someone I did something to still remembers and is looking for me and I have no idea what their faces look like.  In retrospect, I am fine with the outcome and more comfortable in my own skin for it.  I know the switch is there.  They do not.  That is all the security I need.  Sometimes I ask myself if I am being too nice.  I ask myself if I am behaving too well.  I shrug.  I tell myself I am not a rat on a sinking ship.  Certainly, I am not the king of the rats.  There is much more to do with my life than project my violent heart on the screens of the world around me.  What happens when the video skips and the rainbow scaled dragon leaps across the screen and azure clouds belching constellations and weapons blueprints?  Focus less on projections and more on allowing that mean streak to roll.  Why guide it?  Kick back and watch the waves break and listen to the sound.  A person doesn't stand at the sea's lip and scream at the waves.  Attempt to enjoy it, understand where they are from, listen to the sound, and watch the sun set.  Nice guys finish last; violent guys finish dead.

I am pressing myself toward creating music.  A good friend of mine is fairly deep into the art and it is intriguing.  I didn't talk about it much last year because I didn't expect it to come forward in the ways that it did.  I didn't compose a single story last year.  I did, but I did not write a single one down.  There is no writer's block.  Task lock engaged pretty hard through the year.  What I thought would be three months off turned into three, then four, months of person to person tasking.  Exchanging information at a very high rate.  Person to person relationships are still amazing difficult to me to this day.  I can do it.  I CAN do it.  It takes heaven, earth, and hell out of me to make it happen.  It is like cutting off one's own digits one at a time.  Day by day.  Another knuckle.  Another knuckle.  Another knuckle.  At the palm?  Next digit.  Fingernail.  Knuckle.  Another knuckle.  Another knuckle.  Another knuckle.  At the palm?  Next digit.

On the cusp of actual free time, I am typing with nubs.  The fingers are growing back.  Healing the psychological wounds.  It's amazing to think about how I am still alive.  Think about the conversations that lead to continuing to soldier on.  There were two very bad psychological breaking points that I did not see coming.  I know it does not mean that I am getting better.  It doesn't mean that I'm getting worse either.  I haven't abandoned writing.  It's grown distant.  More intangible than it's ever been.  "What's the point?"  When so many outside forces are bearing down on you and you don't answer the phone and it goes 'click'.  I laugh and cry because you never know if the next phone call is going to be the one in the chamber.

The year was severely back loaded with surprises and paperwork.  I am still working on the sleeve of scarification.  I still use the strokes on my face as a daily reminder to never forget what I cannot go back to.  I am envious sometimes that some people have "home"s.  I nearly slipped up.  It was a phenomenal year for seeing my sister.  She is wonderful and sprite.  The suggestions creep in: open the door a little.  Do not.  Do not ever.  I remind myself each morning that I am where I am with what freedom and freedoms I do have by, to coin my father's phrase "pruning."   To let them back in is to let years and years of work fall away.  The garden is not beautiful.  It is in animal and entity.  Do stellar objects have a soul and intent?  Yes.  I will not subject myself to it again.  Ever.  I will never go back.  "I don't hate you either, but I really don't like you."  The kind phrase he put together after I finally told him I didn't hate him.  I wasn't lying.  No one was asked to be born.  You cannot hate your point of origin.  It is you.  Whether you like it or not.  The only thing separating him from outright hate is the blood connection.

If you will, allow me this thought experiment:

Your memories begin where they will.  Your father is just some guy you are forced to live with for the first 24 years of your life.  Can you hate him?  Yes.  Now, that guy happens to be the person who impregnated the womb you came out of.  You realize you would not exist, save for his cock.  Can you hate him?  Well, we're all here now and conscious.  Yes and no.  If there is a flake, a sliver, a hair between hate and intense "fuck him and his whole set up" to quote Josh Norman,  yes.  The only thing stopping me from outright hatred is the unfortunate fact that he decided to create another person with her (which holds her culpable too; is where the pass card comes in, but the general manager and the head coach come and go as a pair).  It is kind of funny to wonder who the owner is.  I laugh thinking about a god as the team owner.  God is like "what the fuck, we need to move this franchise and clean house."  The commissioner is saying, god's god, is saying "aye Danny, you've got to do something with this team, ticket sales are bombing."

The early months of the year was a fantastic cruise of steady work and hand tools.  When everything boiled down to getting people to talk to one another and getting people to a place to sign forms, things got dicey.  I left a few relationships behind in 2015.  I realized I will never be my brother's equal and he will never see the world through my lens.  Same thing with my older sister.  If I never see either one of them again I will not be better for it, but I will never be worse for it either.  Not the case with my little sister.  Every time I get to see her I learn something new and a new way to be.  My family doesn't shrink year by year.  The depth of my connection with the folks around me that I can call and respond with as family grows.  No love has been lost, though some has changed as their relationships to their loved ones and their religions changes.

I think, as we loop around the year and close in on the last things, we are moving in an appropriate direction.  The death threats are real.  Make no mistake.  My love for the friends that I can call family in my new colony is real.  My love for my little sister is real.  My ambivalence toward my elder siblings is real.  As I get older, my tolerance for pain increases as a function of my diminishing indestructibility.  I feel sad for connections that burned out faster than I thought they would, but everyone has their own lives and what is convenient and warm and loving to you is harassment and pipe dreaming and gaudy and ancient and plastic and misplaced to them.

The reason no one talks to you may be because your ability to survive is so tightly tied to your ability to carry a conversation with yourself and the other human beings around you are polite enough, kind enough, human enough, to not interrupt.

The takeaway from 2015 is that we are more conscious than ever before.  We still feel and we still can.  We can love and we can hate and we will take caution.  Our days are numbered and taking the most out of each one is not important at all.  We will never be famous.  We will never be complete.  Our family is not the family we were born into, but we can run operating systems on top of each other to make a complete system.  You're not born alone and you will not ever, ever, die alone.  Waste your breath, waste your time, but do not trick yourself into believing a moment is ever wasted in putting down your hammer, your knife, your gun, your fire, your heart string marionette, your pen, your piss jar, your hat with matching gloves, your shoes, your cigarette, your car keys, your lube, your teeth, your comb, eyeshadow, rubber band, your space suit, your glasses, your sword, your helmet, means nothing.

2015 taught me about faith in people.  Faith in friends.  They don't have to know everything about you to know where you are from.  They don't have to tell you what you mean to them to understand you should pick up the damn phone now and then.  Sometimes it works the opposite way.  You don't have to worry your pretty head about tabs.  They're watching and waiting the same way you are.  Fires on hillsides miles apart on the same planet.  Give them the credit due yourself.   I love you.  It was a good year.  The friends that I do have and the friends that I can call family sincerely, from Houston to NYC to California to Washington to Baltimore to Michigan... well, it's America off of the top of my head... ain't no family overseas.  The point is this: I am not alone in 2015.

I don't know what 2016 will bring.  I am taking on new jobs and expanding limits of circuitry and I am afraid.  It is going to be messy by my standards.  The outlook is heavy and hardline and will take a focus I have not had to muster before.  The bonus will be a new body for this red dragon.  And, and, and, no one will have to die to get there, yeah?  Yeah!  How good is that.  How great is that.  It will not be nose to the grind stone.  2016 will be about how far do you trust me?  I promise you that you will not be able to throw me that far.  I weigh upwards of 185 pounds.  It's only going to get heavier as I get back into the gym after being forced to take three months off when I screwed up and got my face fractured.  How far can you throw 200 pounds?  Joking.  I do think trust will come into play in a big way this year.  Trust in caution, trust in going through the motions of writing to find my muse again, trust in friends to standby and trust in friends to see their vision along their lines and do what is asked of me without question.  

Let's make 2016 about trust and make progress on our scarification sleeve.

Let's do it.  It's not going to be comfortable.  It's not going to be easy.  If you want easy, kill yourself.




///How To Dress Well - "Us In The Sense of Forever"

///*the year end playlist up next