Life like you mean it

To live, not hiding intensity, but using it.

Ahmed al Ahmed who tackled one of the Bondi Beach shooters last Chanukah.

Harry Lime was big and when he did something—for instance, when he slapped you on the back—you could see and feel the force that was inside of him, not because it came out in what he did, but because it came out in spite of what he did. It was constantly struggling to emerge, and in this struggle there was a kind of intensity that most people couldn’t return. You tended to get out of his way. When he was hit by a bullet the doctors said he would never walk. But he wanted to walk and he needed to walk and that’s what he did. What he wanted and what he needed were the same thing. And it wasn’t just walking. When most people walk, they just walk, but when he walked, every fiber of his being was involved in the task of walking. His strength and his appetites and his hatred were all walking with him. And Cotten would like to emulate that. To be like that. To live, not hiding intensity, but using it.

~John Haskell on The Third Man, from I am not Jackson Pollock

You’re a woman, I’m a machine

Everyone who knows an addict knows their environment is constantly conspiring to reveal their secrets but addicts know this is true of everyone sober too. People are always betraying themselves, dying to doxx their souls and expose themselves not in spite of their primping and preening but because they think that trimming their spirit’s bikini line will stop you from noticing their stretch marks. And I’m no different. My instincts tell me I’d hate to know what my listeners and readers think happened across my life to give me the exact figure they see when they read my Substack. But when I think about it, I’m pretty familiar with some of the worst things people think about me. The warm embrace of cope can’t be overstated, but my appetite for looking at myself from someone else’s perspective is large whether they hold me in high or low esteem. All that cognition clouded but compelled by sheer narcissism and the desire to know which inputs produce which effects.

When people can’t easily categorize what you believe, when your thoughts, decisions, and the way you live your life are illegible, people will call you weird, racist, a freak, incel, MAGA, alt right, mentally ill, sociopathic, and my favorite, nihilist. They need to wrap you in a label so they can digest your vibe and move on without upsetting their stomach. They have things to do and the longer they spend figuring out what you are, the more time they’re not checking their phones, ordering things, jerking off and gambling.

To be clear: I get annoyed when people ask their readers to care too much about them since it’s usually an easy way to shoot yourself in the foot (if you’re the author) but the problem is you guys keep subscribing, and paying (thank you), which tells me something I’ve said piqued your interest, you already care, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest and dumb. If I were still single, I’d tell you to say your prayers, that it’s curtains, that we’re basically married. Alas, my wife, who is my wife, is my girlfriend for life.

The devil you know

More and more you guys have been asking me what I believe as if I’m obscuring it by not citing some prefab label you already know but never would have come up with. The thing is I’m always advertising what I believe. I just don’t lead with, “Here’s what I believe.” I state it as a fact of life or an uncomfortable truth and I don’t care whose ideology it clashes or jibes with. Telling you I believe what I’m saying is both obvious and deflationary. And while I spent the opening of this piece telling you I try to deliberately think about the negative qualities people see in me, I spend very little time thinking about which of my good qualities might come off as negative or overly abundant in the package that is Ancient Problemz. So here’s my earnest pitch for amping up one single quality I have in spades that most people need more of: