I turned off likes, comments, and restacks

How to survive Substacking-ish unsuccessfully for a year

I turned off most of my notifications today, including disabling the “community” features Substack automatically puts in the “on” position when you create a profile. I’m usually better at that: combing through my digital devices to ensure no extra banners distract me. I think I’m tired because I’m saturated by distraction. So I turned it all off, and left on the one feature I think is a true community builder: chat (including direct message).

I also tested the functionality after turning everything off, and it looks like you can still quote my post in a restack, if that suits you. I just won’t see it, so… ya… take that however it sits with you.

Last post I kinda used a tactic that I see people on Substack using to get more engagement. They write, with no tact: these are the people that I interacted with and had meaningful conversations, then link all the names. It worked, I got a lot of likes (for me). Though I feel like mine should have gotten more for style points. I decided a while back that I’d support any writer—regardless of their professional taste—as long as they could make their stories tasteful. I sometimes try the tactics in my own special way to see if they are cool. But usually they are boring, so I move to something more fun.

It seems that tactics are most attractive to the tactless. What frustrates me is that those tactics work. One could view that in a variety of ways. Someone without the necessary skill should have available some tools to succeed anyways. Good, got it. But then what do we do with those using the tools to keep the little guy in his cold dark hole? They’ve been practicing with the tools so long, maybe they’ve earned it? Either way I’m choosing not to play the colored emoji connection representation game, cause it’s fucking me up emotionally, and there are more interesting games to play in this reality. Plus… y’all tactic mashers are boring af.

The blatant attempts via bullet points, numbers, quotes on a blank background, ad nauseum, are far from tasteful. They are so tasteless I don’t want to see them. I’m glad I can’t smell them. That being said, I don’t fault a writer for promoting themselves, it is the reality of using the internet nowadays. In this lesson, I’d like to share how I stack, without letting it pile into a rotting soul.

If you missed it, this is our syllabus for unsuccessful Substack class:

Post 1:

"The" process

Why I chose Substack

Who do I write for?

Post 2:

Wordcounting

What inspires me?

Waiting for perfection

Where do I find the time?

Post 3: you are here

How do I...

choose what to publish?

release content (icky word, uh oh!)?

decide on style?

How do I…

I’d like to tell a story. I’d like you to read the whole thing. It won’t bother me if you don’t like it, but I need you to make me a promise.

Stop now, or read the whole thing.

Because what you are about to read is going to change the way you think. And you might think you don’t like me as you read this. But that’s not going to stop us, is it?

I made this same agreement with myself when I started sharing my writing. I said the same thing with “write” instead of “read”. It felt like a fair agreement. It is a noble agreement: finish what you’ve started, and don’t hold back when the seas get turbulent. But that didn’t make what happened noble or fair. I was free, and freedom doesn’t necessarily follow altruistic morality.

But that’s hefty promise, cause this article is going to take you over half an hour to read. You are safe, this is the honors system. I’ve even disabled all the things that indicate you read it. And I’m going to be awol for a while, so… at your leisure.

choose what to publish?

As I combed through, and deactivated, the 15 notification options (the most I've ever seen on an app), I realized how many opportunities Substack uses to bring you back to the app. One thing was most jarring:

Showing your approximate subscriber count on your profile and subscribe prompts (e.g., welcome page, post pages) can boost conversion of visitors to subscribers.

What...

Substack knows exactly how to get the most "conversions," which in sales terms is what they use to promote the best lier to the upper echelons of manipulation incorporated. I let that percolate into my experience with people who send Notes posts into a void of response, just to learn that the algorithm sometimes doesn't send those posts to anyone. Yes, you read that right, the algorithm leaves unpopular people in silent echos of purposelessness. It sounds too similar to the capitalist model of making money with money: advertise your popularity and you’ll be more popular. All that sounds like a conspiracy theory, and it has near zero likelihood of ever being substantiated, because the majority of popularity on Substack comes from talking nice about it, or selling other people on how it's gonna change their artistic trajectory. Real talk: fuck you Substack. But it's not Substack's fault. It’s stacked precariously atop false premises baked into our societal delusions of worth. Substack employees are working to make commoditizing altruistic vulnerability accessible to the masses. That's an impossible task. Like, actually… we can’t all be successful at this. It’s mathematically impossible. In fact, the more you become successful inside of Substack, the less likely the rest of us are to. I’d need a whole ‘nother manifesto to explain that, so take it however you want. You’re gonna agree or disagree despite evidence so whatever, live your life. And simultaneously: you go Substack! The you go Substack slogan everyone is so attached to is also a condemnation for everyone supporting it. I can’t help but laugh at that. I support this positivity rah rah yay weeee mission because I too love attacking an impossible task. And again, they let me turn off all the stuff I hate, so we chill Substack, but you're on thin ice mother fucker.

It’s not really the artists responsibility to decide what’s good and promote it. If you’re truly a good artist, everything you make is invaluable gemstone to you. The manifestation through your exhausted efforts earns it pure respect. It’s not your job to tell people it’s good. It’s your job to protect its beauty. I know that debilitation though, to be someone who wants to do it all. I think we are at the peak of individualsm with AI, and it’s just too much to ask everyone to do everything themselves. I don’t like hyper specialization either, but this isn’t better, the other extreme of that. I’m spilling outside of myself trying to do it all, and I’m not complaining, I have a life that allows that, but it’s not right just because I’ve constructed a way for me to do it. There’s a lot of people without this opportunity, but at this point it doesn’t feel like an opportunity to me, it feels like a distraction.

I sometimes grapple with the idea of earning stuff, like when I comment on something and someone follows or subscribes and I get the simultaneous feeling of filth and accomplishment. I say: yeah! I’m gonna earn every subscriber! Then I go… ewww, I don’t want to convince people to like me. So I’m disgusted with my success a lot, but I’m fairly unsuccessful, so it’s tolerable.

I deserve this is so entitled, even when you worked hard for it. Like… how much difficulty is the threshold for willpower justifiably being rewarded? Who could possibly decide that? It’s like manifest destiny bullshit all over again except now it’s a different subset of humanity that feels like it’s their time and this time it’s different. I think about this stuff a lot, and I don’t really write about it because I know someone is gonna think I’m some supremacist quack with a privileged theory of self importance. I know the irony of that will be lost in static stupidity, and I’d just be watching, mouth agape, at my ideas become bastardized for someone else’s self important rhetoric.

I’m probably smart enough to have and debate an opinion, but I’d rather not have one at all. I’d rather wander around and look at the birds who don’t need an opinion and can dance awkwardly for a chance to have a mate and some chicks that they teach to courageously leap from the nest in blind faith that they can fly.

I’d like that. I pretend to be that sometimes with airplanes and sit calmly as a student tries to kill us via anxiety even though it’s so obvious to me that they just need to soften their grip and trust that I can sniff their ability from a mile away. I always know what my students are capable of, then they surprise me and show they are capable of so much more. I miss that, having a little fuzzy headed, scared hatchling fearing into the unknown with me. It’s an intimate thing stretching wings with another human. I’m ready for that again.

I think I’m gonna wonder when I disappear if my pseudo-connections miss me. But I’m pretty sure I’ll be forgotten and replaced. I’ve learned that too—that I’m replaceable. Women teach me that all the time. My favorite ones find someone that looks like me, but is really far from being me, like they almost got the look right but they didn’t like the true colors, so they returned it for a lookalike and pretended it wasn’t so familiar. I think that’s ok, I’m pretty difficult to be with, easy to like from the outside, but then when you get too close and really poke around it’s all mushy and used up. My insides are hard to digest, I get that, so I work really hard to make up for it with my outsides. People talk about vulnerability like it is this shining exemple of attraction. That’s not true, but it sounds nice, and I think people like that belief model: ooo that might work let’s do it. Cause the reality is way more difficult to manage.

I’m exhaustively honest about this stuff, even more now being so tired of keeping up appearances, that often all of me gets blurted out and someone mistakes it for confidence when really it’s just me having no more energy to conceal how much bullshit I see in the eyes of the zombionic pleasure sacks that Frankenstein-wobble around the planet.

Sometimes I forget that profiles on the internet are people reinventing themselves, though in real life that’s true too. In the online world you’re one more layer protected from the perceived repercussions of your actions, so people really really pretend on there, instead of just really pretending like they do in real life. And I’m not much of a pretender anymore, so the further someone drifts into pretending the farther they are from me. Then they say stuff and since I’ve forgotten I think they are close, but really they are shouting from a different dimension and I should just put my reality headphones in and keep walking.

I know many people spend a lot of energy wondering how much they should release, if they should send certain things. I hope this is an example of how you can send it all, as much as you can muster, and not worry too much that you are “oversharing.” That’s a bullshit term in my world. That’s a political gatekeeping term for people who are afraid of the truth. So this—everything you find here—is a truth.

I say but a lot, like a there’s qualification to everything I think, because there’s always another side to things. And I say and a lot, sometimes to start something, because the start is always some other end. Neither of those functions dilute or disprove the previous assertions when they are added. Even but is an addition to a thought, though it seems alarm bells ring when but is uttered, because people tend to take it as a combative assertion that the other person doesn’t believe them. It’s not like that. The world has become too harm-personalized for effective discourse. I see that as part of a failed popularity complex which we are too afraid to confront because, well… popularity is volatile and our constant self serving reinventions are shedding external shells that lay precariously for everyone to dance around.

There were a good handful of people I care about who commented on these last couple posts. I liked talking to them. That part wasn’t a trick. If you saw how I responded, you know that I was still being as authentic as I can be. But I received too many likes from the previous one to believe that people actually liked it, and were more enamored with the fact that their name appeared in it. Y’all are selfish. Did that sting? I don’t like that we’re all so deluded into a godly image of ourselves, like we must be saintly in our activities, or at least forgivable for our mistakes cause the intention was almost right—but those other people, they are probably unforgivable sinners—they must be below average and more selfish and less aware and potentially absolutely evil. Not me though, I’m different. I’m giving and smart and above average in pretty much everything and a good person; I’m amazing. You’re a disgusting human, and so am I. Can we all agree and be ok with that, and instead of feeling all personally butthurt by blatant reality, use it as something to improve? Cause history keeps telling us that things change, but human nature doesn’t. Our wars repeat, our greed repeats, our “needs” grow. Let’s quit avoiding the hard truth, and do something about it.

So to anyone who feels like responding to this, but can’t because I disabled it. Here’s the reply: ehhh, thanks for the thanks, but I’ve learned that active interaction gifts the giver more than anyone. Creation is a game of sharing, we all win. Send me a message if you really care.

It’s pretty difficult to appreciate things you didn’t earn, and I think that’s what people see when I walk away from something desirable: like they want it so bad but can’t have it, and I’m like… meh I don’t even like chocolate cake I’m gonna go shovel some gravel. I think being justified in our distaste for each other is pretty damaging, yet it’s not so easy to recognize preference is a gift too, and those people are refining their life to best suit the universal vision of their place. There’s pitfalls to all these things, like how I spend so much time contemplating the universal consciousness to the point that I forget I’m still an earthling.

I know that I can go much farther than I can think. I’ve proven that. I’m still alive against all odds. I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be here multiple times over. Death escapes me. I take that as another reason to live more, be more upfront, be aggressively me, and encourage people to jump on board, or wallow in their own inadequacy. I can be whatever reminder you want. Take it or leave.

Something I can’t explain gets me out of bed every morning. I work constantly. I have to force a social life. I torture myself if I rest, pushing to do more. I don’t turn off. But that’s how life is, we are on right now. I’d regret wasting the gift of my second chance. I’d die to give others the opportunities I have. I have too many. I don’t know what to do with all of them. I can’t do them all. I wish I could share that. I thought writing would be the place I could do that, but I struggle so much after sharing. I feel the prying eyes I invited, and whip myself to tears over the cuts I’ve exposed.

So this is that release. I’m not sure where it’s gonna flow after this, but I’ve stopped worrying if you like it, or want it, or feel you need it. I can’t stop you from sharing it if you feel it is in our best interest. And I kinda like that about life, but that’s on you. I got too much to create.

release content (icky word, uh oh!)?

I don’t aim for finished. I don’t rest on incomplete. But I do lose track of an idea and stash incomplete ones away for a time when I remember that I should hit the publish button. The “order” of that is all an energetic debilitation. I can’t check my previous posts and determine what is the right follow up. I’m sure some people have a working formula for that, and use the statistics to their advantage, but I have simply too much stuff not to send it as soon as it bothers me. I do sometimes wonder if I’m flooding my own market too early while too few people are reading it. But I really don’t like feeling that way. So my two options became: post too much, or live in agony on Substack within another moron’s framework of success. Or of course, always available, leave.

I don’t believe many of the Substack statistics are useful, beyond giving every writer a few numbers to develop an unhealthy relationship with. The like feature is no metric for good writing, or effective writing, or… anything. It’s like asking a crowd if you’re attractive while a rock band plays over you in a bustling city intersection. Someone might look over and give you a head wobble, but was that a no? A yes? Maybe? Are they nodding to the music? Are they from India? Another country with a yes wobble? Is someone more interesting behind me? Who am I…? You certainly aren’t going to make any money on that soapbox. You’d be better off improving your skills in a musty subway and casually leave an upturned hat for anyone who thinks you’re good enough to play to nobody in a pee hallway.

Im certain that there are a swath of renegade readers who don’t hit the like button on posts. I know this to be true not because of the worthless metrics that Substack provides, but because I am one of those readers. I had to train myself to use abstracted representations of support to interact with these arts. I forget to hit like, then halfway through the day I wonder if I did send my support to a thing I enjoyed, and have to dig back so some old thing I read to make sure I used the “correct” method for supporting people I like.

Don’t get me wrong, if you are in my circle, I will go to war for you. If you are running from the cops—come over. Just committed murder? I’ve got a truck and shovels, or barrels and a perfect swamp. I don’t ask questions of my people like that because I choose my people wisely, and if they are digging themselves a grave, I’m there asking how deep. Because I know being there for someone is more important than our mistakes, and on the other side of regret we will laugh about the stupidity of decision making and keep going.

Digital representations, and the resultant distanced connection, unfortunately, have a measurable effect on my psyche. I am hurt when something doesn’t get the support it deserves. Not that I know what is deserving, I’m not a demigod or something. It’s not a good system. It distracts us into thinking the popularity complex is going to save us from starving artisinal voidery. I started playing the game for reasons I barely remember now, but they had to do with writing a book and getting my name out and becoming someone who could sell my art. Then it all morphed and I became obsessed. Then I fell in love with pseudo-humans via their art, and now I’m getting all agro-mushy about it because I want to say goodbye.

I write dramatically, and when I hit send I always regret it. It’s not my fault that I think dramatically, but I do wish sometimes that I was one of those steel willed stoics who take everything in stride and doesn’t express much. But often those people seem like repression bombs waiting for a relationship to unload all the emotion they’ve built up from showing everyone they are “strong” and “independent”

I don’t think I like a that writing is intellectualized feelings. I already ruminate too much on my emotions, and they don’t seem to want to shut up. There’s a conflict there: I will always have something to write, but I will always feel the need to write.

Writing used to be a form of freedom for me, but now I see it equally as a prison. I need it. Maybe it’s my way of sharing the human experience, though my favorite ways are raunchy and tend to leave someone hurt. That someone is usually me. I entice my favorite people to visit my painful world by displaying that my pain is fun and worth the experience. They usually disagree and get upset with my deception. But maybe I’m just being dramatic again. I should probably shut up.

Sometimes I read something I don’t like, but I hold my tongue cause I know how much it hurts to send something into the world. It hurts even when I get a “good” response. It hurts to press send every time. I wish I could be a realist about artistic expression but I mute myself when I have bad thoughts. I can’t tell if God taught me that or you did.

It’s hard for me to say that I feel connected to anything. I feel connected because I see what I want to see, and adding that connection is an extension of motive for the things I want now. Time feels like a wobbly oval, like a puddle that has a curved line so close, but then so very far, like sometimes I can see clear across it and feel like I can reach out and we can hold hands while we ride by each other, but knowing it is a circle I know if I hold onto you my arm will be ripped off. I try to hold, believing my arm is stretchy enough to wait for the next bend that brings us together, but I’m not strong enough to bend time just so we can be together. I am that selfish, that I hope I could alter existence so I could feel whole living in the sight of you. And I wish I had control, so I write about it to believe my imagination has an affect on the universe, cause at least in this blurry bend I can send anyone who’s listening an idea that they didn’t notice yet.

And most of the time I like what I write, but hate having to put it somewhere, because I judge myself worse than you, and I shape a new prison with my flamboyant display. Sometimes that prison feels like a prism, and you are getting to see some colorful ray of creation through me depending on where you stand. But I am trapped inside those glass walls when you watch me. I don’t know if it’s real but I can feel you watch me when I put my words on display, even if it is a fiction, an act, a play for your entertainment. I’m still trapped in your moment, dancing for you, playing with the stage, and directing a light show so you can see the parts of me I’m feeling.

I like feeling connected to people, but mostly it feels like a delusion. It feels like I want them to be connected to me, so I invent a new pair of glasses for the interaction and see only what I need to see for them to fall for me. I am manipulation and manipulated in those moments, and look around at someone to blame, but it is just me to blame, so I curse God for gifting me with the hands to make the lens of… my… existence. I feel better when I’m not caught in the deluge of creation, slapping through my tears to keep myself afloat. I feel better when I look around and don’t ask so many questions. But I’m still a kid, and why has always been my favorite. I sometimes think that my thoughts will be exhausted one day and I won’t have the need to put them somewhere, but I don’t have evidence that they will ever end. I’ve said all this, last week, in a poem. I don’t know why I feel the need to say it again. Maybe it hasn’t reached the right person. Maybe I’m a messenger, and should enjoy the fact that I have a use for my feelings. I don’t know who else needs to feel them.

All this makes me feel unimportant, which could be used to realize that I can do anything, but most of the time it makes me feel like everything I do is worth nothing.

So I make an effort to have fun with it until the hands of change push me back into discomfort again. What you are about to read is the most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever written. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t fun though.

I suspect that many Stackers feel motivated by increased response on their posts. But, really, it has no effect on me once it gets past a few likes. I like the comments, I like chatting with people who read the piece. The unintended consequences of connection make me wonder if I’m writing for the wrong reasons. I’m fairly aware that biologically women need encouragement while men need purpose. I can only know that’s true for me, so it’s hard to assign that to ALL of a gender. Sometimes I feel like a little girl when I share my art, but words of affirmation are not enough to make me want to keep going.

Sometimes as a man it feels like people are trying to suck the most enough out of you to prove you are worth keeping around. I get that some women are in love with men who are torturing them, but also I hate that women claim that as a valid justification for all women to get carte blanche on torturing men. It’s not that obvious that they are doing that, because women are biologically programmed (there’s data, don’t hate me) to manipulate for survival. But I don’t need data to know that. Women are bullies, even to other women. I guess men aren’t allowed to point that out. So instead, I’m going to mansplain the shit out of it.

I have an intense distaste for how nerf jolly this overfeminized society is becoming. I don’t want to start a male rights activism newsletter. I certainly don’t want to be one of those bearded, over-religious, self righteous neanderthals who talk about maleness being a God given responsibility.

Ick.

But holy fuck everyone, would we all stop shoveling our myopias down each others attention gullets? I really preferred it when extremist assholes were hiding in real life holes, and mom’s basements, or a desert hole in a trailer with their ham radios trying to prove the conspiracy of thier own lack of talent and inguenuity. Not everyone with an asshole is given the microphone, or newsletter, or whatever tik-tokkers use (a frilly vape pen that tastes like ashy cotton candy, aka taint lint?). So ya, how am I any different than the other morons. I keep reminding myself that everyone is a potentiality of myself in a different skin, with different circumstances. The paradox of our own united uniqueness makes me want to crawl into one of those holes and bore myself until I hallucinate a new diety to promote. Then I could write something truly compelling: the next cryptic religion based on alien mythology and drug abuse.

I comment on my own commentary that is assaulting my reflection in another idiot and can’t help but come to the conclusion that we are ass-fucking our opinions into the shit storm that is our own enlightened new-wave evolution. Consciousness two point oh we’re fucked.

Awarenes of awareness makes me suicidal. And it’s probably good that I’m suicidal, becasue the other option is genocide, and that can’t be good, at least not for the masses. Eugenics has a ring to it when everything you read and hear is self important gibberish vomit, and it looks like most everyone is spooning it off a public bathroom floor and half mouthing while turning to you: “want shum?”

I’m really, perpetually, debilitatingly, baffled by the fact that I love humans. I study them. My favorite activity is people watching. WE. are fuckin. ODD. It’s fascinating. And I’d be better at it if I could spend more time doing it, but people really don’t like being stared at, and really really don’t like being evaluated to the last intricate detail of their incomprehensible actions and appearance. Nobody really want’s to know all their behavior, unless it’s gonna “improve” their life; which is just another rewording for get what they want.

I’ve been real fucking annoyed as of late that I want women. Like… what the fuck is that. Ya’ll are damn near unbearable, God damnit how many “needs” do women have. I can barely have a want, and all I hear from y’all is how I can’t meet your always increasing needs.

Grow up.

I certainly can’t state I need you, I can barely say I love without most of you cringing me into social hermitage, then saying it’s all pretty much my fault. I’m not desirable because I don’t make enough money, can’t read your mind, and pretty much chose the wrong time to exist, or feel, and especially chose the wrong time to talk about any of this. Because that would disrupt your comforts, as if you don’t already demand all of them, as well as demanding that you deserve it because life as a woman is inherently “so hard.” Well it must be, you talk about so damn much. If it’s not already true, it’s definitely manifesting through your complaints. I can’t fathom how gender has qualified anyone for difficulty, but I also can’t possibly know difficulty cause I’m a stupid man, and my life is paved with golden bricks to Elysium, and I’ll never have to work as hard as you to do anything because the whole world is a boy’s club and we’ve posted no girls on our club house cause you’re eeewwieee. And I control everything, including the patriarchy, cause God gave me a penis.

So because I’m so big and powerful and near godlike in your eyes I should gift you with a reprieve from womanhood in the form of sacrificial self torture, which then you giggle and sneer about because men are so pathetic.

The worst part: none of what I just said is imagined.

You, women, taught me all of it.

All I had to do was pay attention. That was the cost of listening. But I can’t possibly be capable of listening, I’m a man, I must have missed the hidden message. If that’s not a global gender cop-out conspiracy to keep people from actually paying attention, I'll eat my dick.

My response to your “hidden” messages: be better, like you keep demanding of men. Because I’m tired of carrying the weight of responsibility that I am in charge of everything, so I should be convincing you (but not in a too too forceful way, and sneaky not creepy) that I’m worthy of you. And, quite honestly, since I’m on this genocidal tirade, which is basically an all of humanity suicide by one delusional ideal… I don’t need you. I know humanity needs you more than it needs me, that I’m replaceable by my very biology, so this is a genetic suicide too, to be saying this. You got it right: I AM NOT DESIRABLE. Run if I show you these ideas because it must be that I am the only one capable of thinking them, and nobody else is hiding the fact that they hate pretending that they are a perfect mate.

But you’re always right, so I’ll take my awareness and understanding and twist it into play manipulation inside your manipulation game and then we can live happily ever after.

The best part: I can predict that you reading that makes you feel like I might be the next cult extremest and try to grow some evil following to live out the bizarre dystopia that I just exposed is living in my mind. When in reality, we are already living that dystopia, and you are pretending that you like it.

Those are ideas, not actions, and this kind of compelling rhetoric makes me seem like a vewy vewy dangerous person. But all it makes me is a good writer, if you believed it. That piece kinda doesn’t though, cause it’s too easy to laugh at it, and too inflammatory, making the real juiciness of it kinda bland cause anyone with an imagination and some chutzpah could make it more convincing by taking out the jokes and really teeing off in despicable way.

When you combine dangerous thoughts with impulsivity and a voice that makes your soul scream, you have someone that looks just like me. But I sound funny, so no need to worry. All of this is a choice in style, the presentation of ideas. That’s the real how of survival.

decide on style?

Sometimes I want something, but I’m not fully sure it’s the right thing to want, so I send out a bunch of nonverbal signals before saying something, just to be sure that I don’t upset the universe with my noisy existence. I don’t like being a burden on life, adding more hardship to an already difficult thing.

I wrote most of this while debating if I was going to pay for an overpriced shit coffee on a shittier airline that I can barely afford because I chose to live this way. So I looked up at the stewardess every time she walked by; I was looking for her to look back in a sign of humanity that yes, I should pump bitter tasteless lukewarm probably yesterday liquid into me to pretend to feel more alive. But couldn’t decide cause I really wanted to sleep but my phone was dying and I really should finish writing this before I have to leave for my little life in the woods. So then when I finally ordered the coffee I dropped my phone, and that’s when most of the words came, and so I found any scrap of anything to get the ideas down. Anyways, hope they are worth it. Have fun…

It’s difficult for me to wake up in the morning. I don’t think that it seems that way, cause I spend the rest of the day finding difficult ways to do things, or doing difficult things so I can find my way. My brain is good at jumbling things like that, and sometimes it bewilders the people I’m talking to. My friends think I disagree just for the fun of it. That hurt for a long time. I was trying to find the correct way to say it. I figured words are important, even though the most popular word slingers were spitting stench from their rotten smiles. It didn’t make sense, how come the loudest idiot received the attention? Are we all so easily manipulated? Or are we all trying to shush the baby on the plane so that our ride would be a little less biting? I think a lot of us respond to things we’d rather not hear, and giving that stuff enough attention eventually erodes the barriers which keep our preferences in their rightful place.

I’m trying to find a rightful place for these words.

It’s not important to work harder or smarter or more or what or where. Life is a game of how. Working is a game of correct. The right place, the right time, the right people, and you might have yourself a success; if you add a little karmic fortune on top of all of it. We can’t control outcome or opportunity or genetics or any of the other things we tend to focus on as the reasons for our shit life plan. And I’m not good at planning. But I am good at flow. And flow is all about style.

I spent some time caring if I was successful, then forgot I was caring cause it would be more fun that way. Like playing a game. If I get really involved in my little game, it can be proportionately fun, and there’s a ton of joy to be had when you are all in on something. The challenge is the ending. Win or lose you have a difficult situation to confront. In winning: how do you share? Do you hoist your trophy over the battered combatant, stepping over them and spitting in disgust at their failure? In losing: how do you recover? Do you blame your teammates, yourself, the cosmic injustices of your body or soul—the game?

How do you handle achievement and defeat? Because no matter what game you decide to play, someone is winning, and someone is losing. That balance is critical to our coexistence.

I see a lot of vilification of gamification on Substack recently. Love isn’t a game! Heart emoji kissy face sending hugs! Gamification is ruining our hormonal balance! The internet is destabilizing our natural humanity!

I hope this offends you: shut the fuck up.

Perspective shifting is important to me, but blaming the same things that are being used to continue a life, a life originated and being balanced upon fundamental humanities, is a recipe for wholesale destabilization.

I’ll simplify: games are natural phenomena. We are allowed to love the game, while loving inside the game, while embracing that we are in all likelihood going to lose the game. You can choose not to play the game. It’s not as fun, but if losing scares you to the point of retreat into boredom, that’s your choice.

Boredom is the main reason I play any of these games. Boredom is the origins of creativity.

I grew up excessively bored. I don’t know if I was expressive about it, but I remember it like it was the only omnipresent certainty of life. I was always bored. Time was torture. The earliest fundamental problem in can locate is how dreadful it is to not be occupied in a stimulating activity. Discomfort, for me, is not all that uncomfortable if it’s not interrupting my attention. My attention is always focused on what I want.

The one thing I can remember always wanting, even in the far far back times, was to draw.

I loved it like not other activity. But something about it bothered me. I couldn't get myself to do it freely. I remember wanting so badly to be able to have a reverse button on my crayon so I could fix the detail that I couldn't get my hands to manifest. It never looked like my imagination. I have never drawn anything to the high standards of my psyche. I took some classes alongside my ever incentivized propensity for solving math problems, but I really never did it outside of a motivated session. In my mind, I had stopped before my teenage years, because it wasn't going to get me anywhere. And a man needs to go places, do things, be respected. My art was embarrassing, it wasn't going to get me anywhere.

With the loss of creation, I stopped reading too. Eventually that came back, but I still can’t get myself to draw. It’s heavy, forcing yourself to do the thing you remember so distinctly enjoying, but cannot recreate the experience. I wouldn’t enjoy a book again until after I turned 25. I wouldn’t finish reading a novel until after 30. I tried, I knew I liked it, but something was broken, and it was nobody’s fault. Maybe it was mine. I lived 20 years, more or less, in creative darkness.

I spent some years attempting what they call sobriety, but truly I was what they call a dry drunk. Still drunk on my thoughts. I got some not so advice seeming advice to write what was in my head, among some other stuff that we don't call advice, and they look like commandments on a wall, but it's just some uncomfortable stuff that is helpful for insane people like me. So then I was writing every night, it was kinda like this, except some really gross stuff came out, and I was like... why was I holding on to all that disgusting goop?

Once all the bad bad nasties were out, a girl decided I was gonna fall in love with her, and so I did, and wrote her bunch of really bad poems, and a song. But she liked that I was obsessed with her, so she loved me back and because she loved me she loved all my little love notes. It was cool for a while, we were like high school loves that never got a high school love. So we were unhinged, and we almost lost our jobs over it, but both decided it didn't matter cause we had each other. It really is a cute story, but there wasn't a happy ending, so I'll just pepper it in between my other life stories until it fizzles out.

I’ve had a handful, or more, real life muses before I knew that was a thing. That’s where my poetry comes from, it’s always emotionally charged, and all my emotions originate from women. It’s a magic spell that women don’t seem to know about. They actually seem mad at me about it. Like stop letting me drive you crazy! I don’t think they’d like how little attention they would get if I treated them like my male friends. In fact I’ve tried that a few times, they get really mad when I do it. I carved a poem on a ukulele for my first muse. I bet she discarded that gift, but I don’t blame her, I try to discard my gifts all the time, then they come back even stronger. I guess that’s what happened with her too, she discarded me and the writing intensified. Now I have sooo many words and I was hoping to put them to use but nowadays I wonder what’s the use. So they get all jumbled and spit out here and I try to convince myself it’s worth the effort. Then I feel like I feel right now about it and wish I had never started. It feels like I’m breaking up with my writing right now because we don’t love each other anymore and one of us doesn’t have the strength to see enough good in the other to make it worth the pain. It’s like writing is my muse, which isn’t so surprising cause I’m on an inception vibe right now and keep seeing layers of beauty in everything but get really lost in which is the core that I should be appreciating.

I don’t force myself to write, but nowadays that’s seeming like a a great strategy cause then if it stops nagging me, I wouldn’t be staying up into the morning to get some of this out of me, then living in a delirium which makes me even more intensely lovesick for no reason.

I often forget, because I am so busy, that rest is an opportunity for perspective. I work like the seasons, I don't take much days off in between days of work. Instead I pile my burnout into an epic psychosis, then sleep, and mill about aimlessly, and consider that all that work wasn't all that important. Then I emotionally attach myself to a new assignment and assault it like it is the only important task in this reality. For these natural functions, I am effective at obsessing, and happily ineffective being purposeless.

I spent much of my youth in boredom and purposelessness. I played video games for quite some time, not knowing if it would be an applicable game. I didn't know that all the functions of a society are a game, and the key is to find the one you are good at. I was good at video games, and still remember some occurrences where I would casually whoop one of my friend's older brothers, who was competing to be a professional gamer. That's interesting that we have those now, because my generation grew up not knowing if we would make money on these addictions, and just played them for fun. That's another key to being good at something. If it's fun, you are free to access the mystical flow of effortless ability. Those skills transferred over quickly to becoming a skilled pilot. I earned my first license just after my 18th birthday, with the necessary financial help of my parents who, to my luck, adopted a mindset early that they would sacrifice any earning capacity they had to promote ANY, and I mean any pursuit that was educational in nature. Sometimes that got aimed poorly, like when I went to college and wasted a bunch of their money on making mistakes. Still feel shitty about that one. That's the curse of misdirected youth. It's our job to learn from those mistakes.

That initial monetary driven passion blossomed in my later years, where I had to pay dearly to renew my pilot's license. Jails and institutions had left poor marks on my life report card, and the other governmental bodies didn't like that, so they sentenced me to a lifelong penance that I'm still living out. I find an immesurable amount of peace in the hoops I still jump through, though I'd be lying if I said I didn't still feel resentment for desk dwellers swinging red pens through my life and declaring, without having met me, that I am a menace to society.

They're probably right after all. I don't much care for society, or institution, or any "organized" group of morons who believe they have expertise in worlds they have never experienced. But we are too large, humans, not to organize in some fashion. So I grant, at the same moment, grace for those morons, and hope they aren't as debilitated as me by the gavels they lift each day towards another person's pain.

But this story has gone on too long. I've heard that people like to hear themselves talk. Maybe it's time for me to quiet down a bit. There is more wisdom in silence than in speaking. It's not so easy to hear the voice of faith when I'm screaming about not being heard. And it's true, not all of us can be. In a group as large as humanity, not all of us get to spread our ideas to the masses. I wonder if I want that. I thought I did as I left my assured position in the world to start writing. I used to have an obvious and effective impact in one-on-one conversations with people. I enjoyed that. When you talk with just one person, everyone gets to be heard. And on a large scale, I guess we still do that. We all talk one-on-one to each other, and that impact then spreads the six degrees all the way around the globe. The internet made that different, and widely commoditized having a following. I think I get lost in the internet, thinking it is the world because of how impactful it seems. Then I return to conversations with an old friend and remember that all those things I said on the internet are gonna be burried in a pile of more idocracy tomorrow, and most people are gonna forget that I said something stupid. And those who don’t think I’m a ignorant lunatic, those who I left a little nugget to carry to the next; they'll remember the important bits, and share those with whoever needs it.

A bonus, just cause you made it through the whole thing

I consider my readers blessed with a curse. You get to see my thoughts. The rest of the world only gets to see my actions. That’s good for them. They want it that way. I can occupy a terrifying variety of thought patterns in the same moment. It would be scary if you saw all of them, because it’s easier to focus on the scariest ones. That’s a survival mechanism. Focus on the fire and lightning. My thoughts are a natural disaster. But I am able to tame that force into actions. I use feelings to direct them. Thoughts are experiments waiting to be given attention. Feeling brings them alive. Action… what we do… That’s what the world uses to pass judgement.

But you.

You get to read my thoughts and project what I am capable of. Your imagination likes that. It’s tasty. That is your curse. Because you get to see as many of my thoughts as you want. I no longer hold back when I write. You could know of all the things I’m capable of just by spending time in my collection.

That understanding makes me believe I am more suited to write fiction, because when you read my full frontal consciousness, it’s too easy to put my thoughts into my body, and fantasize that I am taking those actions. I feel condemned by that. I feel like you see me different when you read this.

And I’d be lying if I were to say that I didn’t like that, that I wasn’t attracted to the idea that I can plant an idea in you, seduce you to my darkness, bring you to these depths of feeling, make you feel my despair. Then be the savior you didn’t know you needed. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want you to be hypnotized by this, to want to hear my voice, or get a whif of the words, or touch what it is to feel these thoughts. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want this to make you want me, in whatever ways you most want.

But also…

You’d never know when I was lying.

Because no matter how much I want it, you can’t see me when I write.

And I know all of that, so the allure of manipulating you to my desires is always there. The power-lust lives behind all my words, and I behind them. I have superpowers, powers that I share with you.

I can disappear.

I can delete versions of myself. I can forget my story. I can be invisible. Silent. Empty.

I have more. I can recreate new identities, new personalities, new selves.

I can be a brand new person for you. Invent an entire reality based on only the details I want you to see. I can hide all the things that I think you don’t like. I can make little things, insignificant things, feel like the most important thing that has ever happened.

I can tell you a story with new facts, and the more I tell it, the more true it becomes.

I can believe in impossible, impractical, dangerous things. Scary things. And I can make it all very real, even if it’s fake.

That’s not as special as it sounds, is it?

Any human can do that.

My super power is that I can black out parts of life, to solely suit my desires. I can turn of my eyes and one inside opens to a different world. I can be awake but dreaming. I can live one of my stories, or build a new one, all while I smile and nod and talk to you, or drive, or fold my clothes, or do a great many things that should hold my attention but are boring enough to allow me to wander to new dimensions. I can forget for whole hours that I am on this Earth. I can enter other dimensions and return, forgetting which was real. And I only know because when I come back time has passed, and the lighting has changed, and people are in a different location. I can’t stop the time, but I can leave it, not care for it, and come back as if it doesn’t hold me.

But that’s not that super either. 

The superpower is that I can recreate the whole experience and put it on a page. And when you read it, you have the opportunity to believe that you are with me in another dimension.

It’s better than that. When I do my job just right, you forget you reading someone else’s thoughts. You think…

this is me…

I believe we all have this power, but not all of us have the opportunity to practice it, and not all of us listen in the same language. What makes it super is the effort taken to learn precisely how to adjust the symbols in a way that reaches the reader’s soul.

So I’ve decided, even though I don’t like it, I’m going to practice writing fiction. And share a lot lot less of what I make. Even though I spent so much effort becoming someone who could be honest, too honest, I feel that exposure has left my soul vulnerable to entities that I’m not so sure are to be trusted. There is no morality online. There are no rules. That’s exciting and terrifying and free. But it might not be the place for full frontal Lee. So I’m going to learn how to tell a lie that isn’t attached to me. I’m going to learn how to tell a story that isn’t mine. And how to keep that story straight, and believable. How to get you to like me, as a character. How to get you to enjoy these words controlling your wandering mind.