I played the living shit out of Morrowind, a game that came for free with a motherboard I bought back in the day. It was fun fireballing the shit out of some necromancers and then flying around with my pants of +1000 flying and then being stealthy and stealing shit, but when it came to the last, say four hours of gameplay, the game was no longer playable as a mage/thief. As soon as you were in caves with guys who looked like the narc-lephant tubesteak from Mos Eisley, you were getting smashed in the face pretty regular. The way they “fixed” this, at the end, was to give you Sunder and Keening, which (along with the handcondom Wraithguard) turned even the most weenie bookworm magenerd into a God amongst Gods, physical stats inflated like a pro athlete on horse steroids, ready to stuff some Ash Vampire asshole full of magical artifact and slice the Corprus cure right out of their prostates. There were annoying parts, it was crashy for me throughout the time I played it, the Rock Gliders were fucking terrible and it was far too easy to accidentally smash through from Starter McEasy’s cruise to pick up a rock for some guy into Holy Crap there’s some Daedric shitstorm happening please let me escape. But it was a good game, and by the time I was done, I was just as happy to put Dagoth Ur into the big sleep with a hammer and a chisel as I would have been with some spells. This game was probably 20 or so hours (with some side questing), which at the time was epic beyond epic, and it had a bunch of expansions (that I never played through). On the whole, it was fun, engaging, and I never felt too much like the interface wanted me to hate it to death.

When I heard that there was going to be TESIV: Oblivion, I was pretty excited. Hell, I could put up with some rock gliders again if it means I can stuff two enchanted ebony gauntlets into somebody’s nosehose and make their brain explode, right? Here’s the rest of my Oblivion review: Un. Fucking. Playable. Boring, unengaging, with a difficulty curve about as steep as a wheelchair ramp to a public library. Whereas wandering too far off your path in Morrowind could get your balls mounted on an Orcish mantle, wandering too far off the path in Oblivion was the quickest way to accidentally get mired down in some impromptu Clannfear population control “quest”, where you slowly start to wish you were watching Jurassic Park and masturbating instead of playing this shitty game. Never finished this one, despite FOUR attempts to go back and play it.

So, seven hundred years later, when I heard about Skyrim, I instantly ignored it. Who fucking cares, they’re gonna get good voice actors and it’s gonna have two well-modeled characters in it and then I’m gonna be beating up palette-shifted imps that scale in level with me for no readily apparent reason, right? Fuck off. Not interested. But then a ridiculous number of my friends started to play it and rave about it, so I decided to buy it. Good decision? Yes. Good game? Yes. Game of the year? SO FUCKING NO. NO NO NO. Now, I’ve dislodged like a full waking week’s worth of time into the game, so I can’t argue about the gameplay per dollar value proposition of the $59 retail price – Dollar for hour this game is an enormous bargain, better than drinking with my friends, movies, novels, or any other non-advertisement subsidized entertainment I’ve indulged in this year. So… why isn’t it my game of the year?

Lets talk, for a moment, about console porting. “Console port” is one of the nastiest phrases in PC gaming, usually spit out in a huff when gameplay mechanics are so kluged to fit keyboard and mouse play that it’s obvious someone’s retarded nephew headed up the PC port team. Lots of initially-console-only games that get released for PC three or four months later have this problem, the game is simply designed and tested for play with a controller, and using a keyboard and a mouse to simulate a controller input is frustrating and horrible. Burnout Paradise (and several other similar driving games like Midnight Club 3) is really pretty, fun to play and fun to drive in on the Xbox. On the PC it was horrific, almost exactly the experience you’d expect trying to use a mouse and keyboard to drive a car. GTA IV (a game I was very exited about before playing it) wasn’t exactly crisp on the console, but on the PC it becomes a bleary vague nauseating headbob nightmare. These “console ports” are usually hindered by graphical bugs, gameplay bugs, crashes, poorly bodged UI elements, and frequently a keyboard completely mapped out with random commands spread across the keyboard “intuitively” (press H for help, press P for put your dick in it, press Y for yes). Skyrim has ALL OF THESE PROBLEMS AND MORE. The person responsible for the dialog tree/system menu/inventory menu should be forced to play games with clean UIs for a fucking year for the sins of Skyrim. I can’t tell you how often I have scrolled down a list of items (Skyrim is a traditional TES game which means, basically, you’re going to have four million things in your inventory at any given time) and clicked, only to have the UI randomly decide what I WANTED to click on was the thing at the top of the list. I’ve actually had to develop a system of rabidly scrolling up and down with the mousewheel and then up and down on the movement keys to make sure my “selection focus” is on the right subsection of whatever I’m looking at. And even then it’s only like 75% certain I’ll click on the right thing. I’ve wasted many a black soul gem and listened to many an uninterruptable, interminable introduction dialog because of this. I get dumped out of sales dialogues sometimes because I clicked on some non-selective zone of the left hand dialog that happens to be in the crook of the N or whatever. I’ve listened to one Jarl or another talk about his area of the Reach like 10 times because I just couldn’t seem to click anything else. I’ve ended up skipping HUGE sections of story-enriching dialog just because I know it just doesn’t matter enough to put up with trying to get all the back story, it’s going to take twenty minutes of scrolling up and down and clicking and doing random shit to get it to click the right option. The system menu and inventory share this lack of click-zone cohesion combined with lack of comprehensive keystroke options to complete actions. Let me explain. To craft a dagger, you find a forge, go into the “Iron” menu, and select dagger. Then you either click it some random number of times and then click OK to each time, or you click and hit Y, or you hit “E” (intuitively selected as the keyboard shortcut for “craft itEm”) and then Y. Or hit OK. Every time. Ridiculously, this is the BEST crafting interface in the game, requiring the least retarded number of steps. Enchanting is a matter of selecting an object (by clicking), selecting an enchantment (by clicking), selecting an “intensity” for the enchantment (by clicking and dragging or using the left and right keys) then hitting enter, then selecting a soul gem (by scrolling down an interminably long list of gems), then hitting R (to (silent R)enchant) and then click OK or hit Y. Don’t even get me started on creating fucking potions because it’s just worthless. It’s past frustrating, even in “cheating by looking on the internet” form, seriously, look at this page and tell me what the fuck is going on. JUST SELECT YOUR INGREDIENTS BASED ON THE EFFECTS BUT DON’T END UP WITH TOO MANY EFFECTS! I wasted half an hour making healing potions to keep my elfwuss alive before realizing that the “Potion of Healing” was actually healing me for 52 points and then draining 40 points of magica. For… some reason. I’m sure. Recharging magical weapons, of course uses the keyboard shortcut T, for “recharge this Thing” and is the only area of the UI which doesn’t respond to the mouse wheel, and inexplicably doesn’t have a scroll bar to the right to indicate you can scroll down at all, you simply use W and S to go up and down. WHO THE FUCK DESIGNED THIS SHIT. Seriously, were you guys not allowed to talk to each other while programming this shit?

There’s a whole host of other problems I can mention but they’d all be excusable if the crafting and dialogue interface weren’t so fucking horrible. The map is 3D but for some reason you can only zoom from “looking at a topographical map from 10 feet above the table” to “looking at a topographical map from 6 feet above a table”. Travelling to an area doesn’t clear any fog of war, no, no, your map has active cloud cover that obscures the very, very vague paths that lead you through mountain passes (which are sometimes intentionally misleading, making it look like there’s a wide winding path up a face when in fact it’s a ski-slope of impenetrable rubble). Stealth is a joke, guards will regularly detect you even when wearing magical stealth boots and gulping invisibility potions, but it’s OK because only rarely will a mission involving stealth NOT be fixable by just murdering everyone in the current area code. I completed all the Mage’s college quests with a warhammer and the two default spells they give you at the beginning (plus the ONE spell I had to purchase to gain entry). There were two pretty cool puzzles (the big dwemer sphere that you had to “align” the crystal with fire/ice and the dungeon you had to use elemental spells to unlock doors in) but then there were 40 more dungeons whose only “puzzle” was to turn some pillars to the symbols CARVED IN THE FUCKING WALL BEHIND THEM. This is the ancient Nord version of putting your password on a post-it on your monitor I guess. The MOST interesting and engaging quests were completely optional Daedric shrine quests. And worst of all… I’m not done yet. I’ve got hours and hours in and no sense of completion. I’m the Archmage of a whole college, the king of thieves, the master assassin and not at any time has it felt like “woo, that was awesome”, it always just feels like putting a line through a to-do item and completely un-like, say… portaling Wheatley to the moon, or exploding an enormous, armor and laser encrusted RadScorpion, or even finally fucking killing a mob in minecraft — any number of other awesome gaming moments I’ve had this year.

Brad and I had a discussion about Skyrim in which he very astutely pointed out despite all his problems with the game that he had 80 hours of play in it and it “didn’t owe him anything”. It’s true, I don’t feel like Skyrim owes me anything. In fact I feel a little ashamed I’m not gamer enough to finish all the food left on my plate (there are gameless kids in africa who would LOVE to enchant just one dagger), but ultimately my time in Skyrim is going to go out with a whimper and not with a bang. Instead of a sense of ultimate badass completion, it’s gonna feel like quitting a shitty job.

PS I am totally moving another person to Portland even though you all told me to stop.

question… in general…

(disregard grammar, consider theme)

Well, that sentence is a natural paranoia/worry/fear manifesting as a chink in your artistic/professional self-opinion. There are literally dozens of very good reasons that it’s silly to think that about Portland, but they’re kinda complex to explain and very easy to just see, so I’ll ignore those and march forward into the “artistic/professional self-opinion” bit.

So, basically, leadership and true human “excellence” come from a very specific mental conditioning, it requires some intelligence combined with some humility in the early years, and then a very specific voice. God’s maybe, mom. A girl you think is hot or your priest, tells you that you’ve “got it, no sweat, you’re born to do this” and it emboldens you. You decide to DO SOMETHING in all caps don’t care what it is because that voice? It was right and you wanna hear it congratulate you when you’re done.

Now, that’s all fake. That never happens. What actually happens in that fleeting moment of inspiration is a stopwatch starts. That moment of actualization? It was a reset. Right at the moment? There’s only two voices in your head. Your own strong, familiar internal dialog, and the voice of someone who loves/fucks/titillates/nurtures you saying “You can do it”. And the stopwatch is now counting how long it takes for a voice of terminal doubt to get in there and jam up your shit.

For a depressingly large chunk of folks? THAT voice sounds just like Dad or Mom or themselves when they’re drunk and it just beats em’ before they even have a chance to think about what the “something” was. Afterglow is over and who gives a fuck what some stripper says anyways, fuck it. They’re done. Back to frappuccinos in the new reusable ultrachug with bonus drinkDiaper(tm) and trying to up the threadcount on the sheets.

If you make it all the way to “fucking around trying to think up what something to do is” without getting jammed, you’re now a doodler. You’re a tinkerer. You read a lot to try to get ideas or you learn how to run long distances or you get a job or you finish college or whatever. Stuff that’s easy to get into a track and push on gets completed. Things that are more free form tend to either not get finished or you run into obstacles. But you’re still young and nothing has stopped you yet and your great awesome young brain is just wet and hot with ideas, you’re soaking in em’! SOMETHING is in there just waiting to get out, as soon as you figure out what it is and how to do it.

So, if you manage to tinkerdoodle around enough and still not get upset and stop, and you get bored with all your hamster-wheel life progress meters, you develop some skills, and now you’re a journeyman. A person who can do. Not maybe SOMETHING in all caps but stuff, you can do stuff.

This is where almost all of the adults on the planet stop. They can do their oil changes and clear their toilets or they can take a pretty good wedding picture or they play guitar in a local band. They bake a wicked apple pie or they write a pretty good essay. They still dream a little, but they have enough “life lessons” that the voice of terminal doubt? It’s their own. And it comes in a cool breath of logic, yeah we’d all like to sing an aria at the Sydney Ampitheater but there’s a mortgage payment dummy! Or, in many cases, SOMETHING came to be. SOMETHING turned out to be a son, or hitting upper management or owning a muscle car just like the one in that movie except for the rusty muffler, and it just takes up the slack in any left over creative impulses. I’d write a symphony but Die Hard is on and that’s my favorite nap movie.

And then all that’s left are the artists, craftspeople, psychopaths, the sociopaths. These three groups have something unique inside them that tells them that they need to DO SOMETHING REAL BECAUSE THE REST OF THIS SHIT IS FAKE. Artists feel the whole sentence. Craftspeople hear “Do something real”. Sociopaths get “the rest of this shit is fake”. Psychopaths get “DO SHIT”. They’re intelligent enough to be bored by their station, have successfully avoided or defused internal doubt and external judgment, and the drudgery of day to day existence hasn’t curbed their intense need to externalize their singular vision. They’ve developed their skills through long practice and have developed exquisite “taste” in their particular fields of interest. This is where Rick Perry lives, and Churchill, Ted Bundy, Pablo Piccasso, Paris Hilton, Charlie Sheen. It’s where genius and madness are stranded with each other when the masses return to rest. Which is unfortunately why you’re running into so many dickholes.

But I digress — there’s nothing to be gained from _thinking_ that sentence, unless you wanna go think it to you at… fourteen? That’s a “terminal doubt” of the kind that can only work when it’s integrated early. It’s an ineffective deterrent thought-scourge that you ran over your ego dozens of times like some kind of purification rite and it’s silly. You’re past that. It’s an emotional
damage-control device you’re using to preemptively prepare yourself for failure and it’s the sort of shit I do all the time. I do it less now. Because I recognize that forcing myself to a psychological low before starting a project is counter productive, the “net happiness” from a situation where I forced myself to live out every variety of failure before starting is a low gain proposition if I succeed wildly, and in every other case is a stone cold bummer followed by a halfass payoff. It’s a weak type of magic spell that you learn when you’re young and have no other use for all that beautiful brain that god gave you, like a really shitty computer program that just pulls up the pictures on your SD cards where it thinks you look “extra fat”, it does it very slowly, turns on all your fans while it does it, and when you agree that the picture is bad, it doesn’t do anything with it, it just finds another one to show you. Sometimes it just shows you the same one over and over for hours until you agree you look fat in it.

Quit doing it. Or, do it alllllll right in a big ass pile. Say it out loud to yourself, say it in words so you have to hear it. Say “I’m a fraud and a fake and nobody believes in me and I’m gonna fail.” say it in the mirror and cry about it, cry over all that wasted effort you gave to projects that went nowhere and mourn the innocent youthful you who squandered so many opportunities. Do it all the way out. If you have a relationship with god? Talk to him about it. Or just talk to somebody dead about it, it doesn’t matter, pick somebody who can hear you, and who most of all can effortlessly understand the emotions which are forming your words, and talk to them. Have that out. Get real stoned. Make fun of yourself. But only do this doubting out loud. ONLY do it out loud. Don’t write it, don’t let yourself do it in the car in your head. If you’re in the car and you start having this desire to dig down a sadness bunker to wait out the war? Talk it out. Talk to the radio guy. Talk to the commercials. No I do not care about five dollar foot longs all week mother fucker because I have a fucking problem here that you would not believe. Don’t let it live in your head. Because it’s a loop, it’s a computer virus, it’s like you looked at too many porn sites and eventually your computer starts running like shit (I mean a regular computer not your immunodepressedMac), and you need a reboot, but the brain doesn’t “do” that, so…

There’s a concept, in the new “cloud computing” paradigm, of having “tiered infrastructure”. Basically, you can run a whole computer and if part of the computer’s software is gonna be thrashing the hard drive, you can physically store that data on really fast memory, and all the boring text files and backgrounds on much less expensive, much slower hard drives. This is “tiered storage”, the hard drive looks like one big thing to the computer but it’s split up according to how fast we need access to it. I believe the human brain, having billions of years more R&D time, is like “tiered compute”. We have this big fancy new part, cerebral neocortex, which is capable of all kinds of neat “wide” processing. It can take really big ideas and think about them all at once, think about their relationships, we can hold dissimilar ideas and compare them. Then we have the paleocortex limbic system, which is just kinda “where the rubber meets the road”. It’s where we keep “what gunshots sound like” and “the sick feeling when you know you broke a limb”, and the fear of strangers. Interior logic fights, stuff that’s all hypothetical and never needs to interact with your sensor organs or limbs? The brain starts to run them as efficiently as it can, and the neocortex is waaaaay complicated and takes up a lot of kilocalories. Part of the brain’s survival-efficiency routine is to makes the loops smaller and smaller, and stuffs them further down the stack, if you can basically reduce a very complex argument to “you are dumb” and you iterate it often enough, the brain will try to just throw a “you are dumb” signal out from the limbic system on an interval to make you stop using the fancy part so much. So you get all the endocrine system triggers that come with feeling shamed/stupid on a regular tap and then it just lives as tension in your lower back forever. Forcing yourself to talk it out brings it back up to the fancy processing and lets you experience it fully, which will help the brain stop trying to simplify and automate it.

Here’s what you should be thinking about. How much stuff you can sell on Craigslist in the next three weeks, how to work the logistics of leaving and driving up, how many people you can find to take your lease. I have four days of vacation to use before the end of the year, two of them are yours if you need a copilot. Past that, it is in the chubby thick babyhands of Dr. SpaceJesus. Go have your freakout, take a nap, and then re-assess your to-do list when you’re done. It’s like jackin’ off before a date so you’re not all nervous.

I have always been very bright, and very very patient. This pairing was, until recently, what I considered my greatest gift. I wasn’t verry pretty, nor graceful; healthy; successful — But smart as a little monkey and patient enough to wait out the goldrush suckers and bamboozlers, wear out the brutes and the quick, until I could bring the powerful leverage of my monkeysmarts into play. And at each step of my social and educational journey, I was attentive, intuitively capable and intellectually open, able to make rapid leaps between active cognition, internal synthesis, and then re-communicate core ideas of lessons learned. I boil down the lesson very efficiently, I regurgitate it very convincingly, and I follow it very well. I did great on tests. Teachers loved me. I could not pay attention in class and finish all my homework before I got home. Other students hated me, but my ability to turn that blanket of attentiveness and communication to them gained me a small but insanely close group of friends. I excelled in almost all areas of academic study, I was taking college level math, english, chemistry (a subject which I hated and still loathe, but whose central concepts were so easy for me to regurgitate that after an all-nighter out dancing I managed to best all my classmates in a state chemistry competition), and had fully exhausted the physics program available at my school, instead spending the after lunch period idly toying with electronics while talking to my Physics teacher.

There are really two major crises which can arise when an intelligent person is made to believe at an early age that they are smart enough to not have to _learn_ things. One, it can make them into a sociopath. Learning how easy it is to dupe people around you is intoxicating. (Donald Trump is many things but he is not dumb. He is smart enough to realize he can get people to agree with _him_ and not his _ideas_ by using the right tone.) The other is that they get convinced that they are the smartest person in the world. Guess which one I picked (and I thought I had self-esteem problems! Hah.)

Being the Smartest Person in the World

Being so smart that people assume you know everything sucks. At first it’s fun because it’s titillating to impress people. And as a kid, I assumed eventually I would find some core group of competent adults that is out there running stuff while all “the idiots” meander. But eventually, the fun wears off and by the time I was about… ten I had become so nervous about ever NOT knowing the answer, about ever NOT having the solution, or being awkward at a task, that I was embarrassed about being taught. Embarrassed about learning things FROM other people. Because they were all dumber than me! How could THEY, with their slow moving brains and their chubby stupid hands, teach me! ME! The boy who was so smart his dad just _knew_ he didn’t need some gross “sex talk”. The boy who was so bright he just learned things by _being_! So without realizing it, I committed myself fully to the idea that I was the smartest person in the world. I obsessively collected “farcts”, specific details which belie deeper knowledge of a process or concepts. When I didn’t know a thing it was embarrassing, so when I found out about anything I needed to delve as “deeply” into it as I could as quickly as I could, just so I’d sound knowledgeable if somebody happened to want to talk about frost-damage on cactii or old tractors or South American regime changes. And each time I was rewarded for farctical information, it emboldened me further. I _was_ the smartest person in the world. Everyone agreed! Because they were always impressed by all the stuff I knew. And knowledge is power! So I knew I had power, and I was smart enough to know have read that with power comes responsibility. And being the smartest person in the world must be a seriously big responsibility. It meant I could never ever ever let other people be better than me.

This interestingly idiotic assertion of intelligence wasn’t really conscious. Or not wholly. I knew I was separating the world into two camps, the competent (me and some unknown army of people who make the world work right) versus the incompetent (everybody I had met in my entire life), but it didn’t feel mean, it just felt like I was doing the retards a favor by not expecting much from them. I was angry at the world for not opening every door for me, in awe of my smartness. And I fed that burning anger, like it was ragefire that sustained me.

Into that fire, I fed five jobs, eight years. Countless friends. Unknown chances at bliss. I fed it my energy and my sadness and my hatred and my love and everything I had. Every single thing I had I fed into the same stupid fire, convinced somehow that I could make it burn so hot that struggle itself would cease to exist.

And one day I woke up and tasted the ashes in my mouth — the charred cumshot of a decade of masturbatory rage. I’m done with being angry that the world isn’t perfect. I’m done with being angry that I am not perfect. And I’m done with assuming I’m too smart to have to learn.

Next time: How I learned to stop worrying and love Dr. SpaceJesus.

– Talking Heads “Life During Wartime”

Feeling overwhelmed when the situation is bad is totally normal. When my life was a freefall of poorly placed faith, badly chosen partners, untenable, inconstant living situations, and marginal employment, I was forever swimming upstream at a feverish pace. Racing, leaping, grasping, waiting for the next big setback to smack into me and send me sprawling. When I remember my day to day struggle at the time, when I tell stories about it, it sounds (and _was_, in every sense) exhausting. But it was easy. It’s easy to come home so tired you don’t care where you live. It’s easy to shuffle from job you don’t care about to job you don’t care about. It’s easy to think of everyone as an enemy or an obstacle. It’s easy to dismiss all good things in your life as coincidence or happenstance, because then you aren’t surprised when they disappear again. After all, it’s not your fault, it’s just that life sucks forever and that situation NOT sucking was a part-time exemption. You had your vacation and now it’s back to the slog, sucker.

Well, my life isn’t a freefall any more. I’m no longer marginally employed. I choose the people I spend my time with and how much energy I expend on their needs with a more balanced and even hand. I’ve lived in my own house for two and a half years now. I own my car outright. I’m dating a wonderful person whose company brings me a lot of joy. I’m thinner than I’ve ever healthily been, I’m having sex regularly, I never really have to worry about money (day to day), and after weeks of PNR stretching, meditation, and plenty of swearing, I can almost touch my toes. I have friends and family who love and care about me, even my PETS are clean, healthy, and happy for god’s sake.

So that brings me to last night, when I was again sitting in my garage, endlessly fretting about whether or not my friends _actually_ like me. Whether or not my life has meaning. Whether or not any of what I have accomplished is “real”. Just a self-effacing pity cycle. Mope mope mope. I used to think this was OK, a defense mechanism for preempting disappointment. I encouraged it, even. I took snippets and misquoted Nietzsche and the Hakagure and pop culture. I cultivated a philosophy of pessimism. A grim hedge around my happiness — carefully trimmed to suit my mindset that I was fundamentally not worth attention or affection and that life is fundamentally unfair; a rigged game whose rules were either so unimportant I shouldn’t learn them or so ludicrously set against success that I should actively avoid engaging it.

This negatively weighted world is simple, and when things are bad, it seems to be a great philosophy. If all you know is self doubt and suffering, you are never surprised when you suffer. But I never knew what to do with joy, never learned how to trust my heart, and because of my overwhelming negativity, I never planned to live this long. It never even occurred to me that I might be 32, rested, well-laid, and gainfully employed some day. So, nonsensically, my biggest problem right now is learning how to be happy when I am _happy_. It’s harder than I ever thought it would be.

1. Fix garage roof
2. Front/back deck
3. Get Yamahahaha going
4. Rewire Datsun w/LED lights/new alt/fancy fan
5. Sell Versa
6. Sell Kymco
7. Chicken tractor
8. Raised beds for front yard
9. Tear down shed/build tea house
10. Fence front yard
11. Fix edge of driveway/complete earth ramp in yard corner

Fast forward to Monday night. I was sitting down watching a movie, and I felt a headache starting. It had been about 36 hours since the last one. They come on quickly, and present with watering eyes, my nose either plugs or just one nostril plugs (the right one), and then the headache starts: an eye-socket-to-hairline swath of unrelenting ant-bites-inside-my-skull pain. Monday night I would have done anything to make it stop. I had my shoes on and my jacket on to go buy cigarettes on the off chance THAT would help. It was probably a 9 on my pain scale. I couldn’t sit down, I had to be moving, I was rubbing my head and neck and nothing was helping. I took a hot shower and laid down on the couch and finally all I could do was lay in bed until I fell into fitful sleep. Thursday morning, when I got to work, I had another one. Exactly the same, another 9. Eyes tearing, nose plugged. I’ve never had a headache as bad at work. And people were visibly concerned. It’s disconcerting when I can’t even concentrate on a sentence long enough to get from the start to the end of it. And I recognize the discomfort, the nausea, and the “like a storm clearing” speed at which the pain recedes from headaches of my youth.

I’ve been having these headaches basically daily (or multiple times daily) for a month now. I finally stopped just ignoring the “if you have a bunch of these they’re not migraines” paragraph at the end of every migraine description and clicked on a link to cluster headache. It’s… undeniably what I’m experiencing. There’s no cure, just prevention. So… I’m keeping a headache diary. Trying to track all the triggers which might be causing it (all of them, aside from cocaine, are basically in the running, since I don’t do that yak). I don’t really have much to say about this other than I hope it’s not a tumor (knocking on your mom).

“Deeper in Debt than Mexico” – The button which hung on the overflowing bill-basket at my childhood home.

“Aaron, you’re a pretty smart guy. You have gotta be able to figure out this ‘stock market’ thing.” – My Father’s advice to 16 year old me on ‘Finance’. The first time I remember him discussing money with me.

Money and me have never gotten along. I like spending it. I like when I have a big pile of it and the excitement of knowing I’m gonna spend it. Sometimes I even like the things I spend it on. But for the largest part of my life, money has been more enemy that friend. The lack of it, the mismanagement of it, the expectation that it’ll be there when it isn’t. I’ve scraped together my first meal in two days out of couch cushions and I’ve floated checks for cigarettes. I’ve been fucked over and over by money, largely because I wasn’t ever taught about it. Not in school, not by my parents. TV pretty much told me what I already knew: having money is rad and spending it lets everyone else know about your personal radness level. Friends let me know that it was really fun when I spent my money on them. My parents shared plenty of lessons about (borderline psychotic) work ethic, integrity, personal responsibility. But as far as somebody who cares about me teaching me what it _means_ to have money, what “savings” is,  how to manage income? Hah.

There were times as a kid, that my dad was earning _excellent_ money and we were still having to time our grocery store trips to coincide with paydays. My room was adrift with toys, my parents would clandestinely throw away baskets of toys which I’d never even notice were gone. I wanted for NOTHING, but at the same time, there were last second runs to pay a bill and keep the electricity on. But as long as the fridge was packed with Coca Cola, pork tenderloin, and condiments, the cable TV was going, and we could drive anywhere we wanted to in our (many) cars, it seemed like we were living a lavish, comfortable life style.

Basically, my family took money for granted when it was present and panicked when it was gone. And for years I had no idea there was any other way to live.

I’m going to tangentialize here for a minute – Bear with me, it’s related. When I moved away to college, I had some severe social and personal anxiety. The way I masked my inability to introduce myself to others was by taking up cigarette smoking. I had smoked a little in high school, some cigars, two or three cigarettes a week when I could sneak a pack into the back yard shed. But when I went to college, they became my lifeline, a habit that I could quite literally structure my day around. By the time my second term came around I was at a pack a day pretty steady. By the time I dropped out it was more like two. It took years for me to try to quit the first time, it took years for me to try again when that failed. Five years of smoking later, I decided to quit for good. Six years later (about a year and a half ago) I grabbed a cigarette from somebody while out drinking, and a pack-a-day sized monkey was howling at my brain before I even knew it. This is how I remembered what addiction feels like, how completely it affects you. Here’s a small example of what happens when I’m quitting cigarettes: I wake up at 2am wondering where all the half smoked butts in the yard are. And I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t ever walked out there and taken a few stale drags. It doesn’t even feel like physical need at the time, there’s nothing in your lungs telling you that it needs some smoke, it is simply the all-caps-flashing-neon NEED, a general sense of impending doom, and the desperation to have that need quenched.

It is only fitting that so many of my monetary problems dovetail with smoking problems, because I was raised utterly addicted to money. I spend money to counteract bad moods, to celebrate victories, to impress my friends. I spend money when I know I shouldn’t, I sometimes lie about spending money when asked. I have put off work, friends, and family, in order to spend money. And as I have slowly made my way out of the pitch blackness of monetary despair, I’ve learned a LOT about myself, my relationships, and the responsible management of money. As you may have noticed in the upper right of this blog, there’s a box that has all my financial details in it. It’s not 100% up to date at all times, but it’s a good general picture of what I have going on. There’s no value judgments up there about what my debt was incurred for, there’s no talk about the decisions I make about where my retirement savings goes. It’s not all inclusive and if you believe for a second four lines is enough space to get even a basic picture of financial health, well, heh, you may be as fucked as I was when I started. But it’s an OK start. It helped me get on the wagon. Just like with any addiction, the road to recovery usually starts with the admission that you have a problem.

“One symptom [is that] the moral valence of debt and spending is reversed, and the multiplication of wants becomes not a sign of dangerous corruption but part of the civilizing process. That is, part of the _disciplinary_process_.” [DUN DUN DUUUUUN uncomfortably dramatic emphasis mine]

Every new social tech increases exposure well before it finally creates etiquette (which is frequently ignored). And with that increased exposure, no matter how honest or dishonest, deep or shallow, it is easy to over estimate the true intimacy of relationships. It’s natural, people are machines of want, and want is about possessive desire — we are _all_ natural stalkers of the subjects, objects, and people that stoke our passion. But sometimes, somewhere between the facebook and twitter and buzz and bloggytextfoursquares, the _person_ starts to lose out to the preconceptions you are bringing with you. And when it’s someone you’re romantically interested in, it is easy to wish that every line was meant for you, to wish that they hang on your every response and think about you constantly. To scheme for attention, to scrutinize for meaning, to overthink and maneuver and extort. It’s an insane, singular psychological investment called “emotional frontloading”. This is the insanity that makes you wonder if a girl you’ve never exchanged twelve words loves you. It’s what makes you resent people you like because they don’t understand you instantly, or more specifically because they don’t embrace you unconditionally simply based on the (objectively completely invisible and meaningless) work you’ve already put into caring about them.

It’s unfair. It’s a unidirectional type of affection which is more closely related to ownership than romance. It’s branding, not in the marketing sense but in the cattle sense. LOVE as a leash, a label, and a lash. Again, something that denies the essential humanity of others, attempts to simplify them so they fit into your preconceived emotional/interpersonal destination. Maneuver, maneuver, maneuver. A childlike idea of conquest, that people, like games, can be won completely with sufficient strength and sneakiness.

My only hard-set goal in 2011 is to – recognize when I am; accept the truth of; and finally _stop_ – emotionally frontloading. Treat people like people. Make fewer assumptions. And continue to build my life of purpose and honesty as best I can.

I thought a lot last year. A lot. But instead of thinking about work or math or history or cars, I thought about myself. I thought about what I’m doing, what I need. What I want. Mortality, career, romance, all of the big ones. But that’s all internal. There’s no sounding board to reality on any of that, you just build it into your own little dorodango, a ball of your own mud that you think is perfect.

And then in just two little blips it was shattered. Turns out my mudball was just another mudball. That thought of internal perfection, the building of a logic ladder inside your own head without the challenging ideas of others? It’s lazy. A selfish ownership of reason that denies the essential humanity of others in your relationships. I spent six months mourning my imperfect mudball, trying to figure out how all my focus could have gone wrong. How could all that hard work I put into _believing_ in my righteousness and then be wrong? Because faith without honesty is worthless, and honesty is something that must be both internal and external. You can think you’re being fully honest with yourself all the way until you are forced to think about something you have no context for.

Six months, mourning my broken mudball. Alone. By choice. Hiding behind the hurt, too lazy to work at healing, too cautious to make progress any other way. I hid, from the responsibility of my humanity, behind the things which have damaged me, instead of trying to truly put them behind me. And all it took was two little blips.

These are the lessons that 2011 started me off with. Interaction with other people is both necessary and terrifying. There is no shame in needing others. There is no shame in being hurt but nobody should love you for failing to heal. Pay attention to what is being said but also pay attention to what is not being said. And then, Bridget Pilloud, who is responsible for a startling number of palm-smacking-forehead moments? She set me up for a doozy: Think about others more, think about their problems less. And realize that nobody cares about your bus crash. You should care less about your bus crash too.

I hate it when another one of those old lines comes up, something you’ve heard a thousand times and not ever listened to. And this is what it all comes down to. A song lyric from a cassette tape I played until it was ruined, almost fifteen years ago. A song which gets stuck in my head from time to time even now. Echoing through my personal history, telling me to pay more fucking attention.

I was having this discussion in a taxi heading down-town.
Rearranging my position on this friend of mine who had a little bit of a breakdown.
I said, “Hey, you know, breakdowns come and breakdowns go.
So what are you going to do about it – that’s what _I’d_ like to know.”
- Paul Simon – Gumboots

Pain doesn’t earn you shit, turns out. It’s what you do with it.

Do.
Not.
Fuck.
It.
Up.

See, food? It’s amazing. Real food is sweet and complex and wonderful, even raw — especially raw. We have so much variety available now, and it’s easy to want to over-do it with wildly overthought culinary craziness. Wrap it in bacon, stuff it with bacon, truffle oil it and sous-vide in early harvest Malbec with creme anglaise and Krispy Kreme reduction. But when you have a line caught grouper steak on the griddle, what you should really be doing is trying not to ruin it, instead of trying to remember where your black volcanic finishing salt is for the chipotle-mole foie whip. Everything you add TO the fish cannot fix overcooked, ruined fish. So you must concentrate not on the darkest corners of your spice rack but on the basics of cookery. The temperature of the pan, the quality of the ingredients, alternating patience and measured attention until you have delivered on your promise to the beast that it did not die to become a Filet-o-Fish. Each thing you do to the meal beyond that is adding complexity and risk, and once you reach the end of your capabilities as a chef? You are just sabotaging the dish, then the meal, then sabotaging yourself. Because NOTHING is less satisfying than working for six hours to make the perfect chive and anchovy sauce to put on some cheese souffle best described as “malted chalk-glue”.

Consciously or unconsciously, these effort- and time-intensive failures predispose us against cooking at all, because if I just want a plain BURGER I can get it at BURGER TOWN, right? And this realization, the simple act of noticing that I fucked up a project because I spent too much time making the pointless gestures and belaboring decisions that make no difference? It has freed me from many failures. Simplicity is Clarity. It’s at the top of this page and at the heart of every blog I have had for twelve years. And every year, I discover in some fresh new way that I have been Doing It Stupid and I should be Doing It Simpler. That applies to everything in my life. From friendships to projects, from food to money, my entire goal is to not fuck things up by making them complicated. Automate it, maintain it, nip it in the bud, do not put off until tomorrow what should be done today, take whatever steps you must to do it right, but do NOT make it complicated.