Chilling on the deck with my pooch, studying languages and shorthand, drinking some yerba mate.

Stressed about work. Currently not working. Have a second interview with a store manager when he gets back on vacation–maybe next week–and I’m stressing about flaming out at my last job. Like, seriously, I hope it doesn’t sink me for the rest of my life. I’ve enjoyed most of the work I’ve done in the past 7 years, but I decided to take some risks, and they didn’t work out. If I feel like if I’ve ever had any issues at work, it’s “red flag” to employers, and it doesn’t matter what the reason is. I think the usual dodgy bullshit answer is, “It wasn’t a good fit.” But I really want to launch into a whole thing about how the position was structurally unsound, my boss was emotionally a coward, the entire organization was built around backscratching, and so much more. But, it just wasn’t a good fit, I guess.

Is a work history just supposed to be a conveyor belt smoothly travelling upward, ever upward?

Edit: Also my folks is visiting me and things are pretty mellow. My dad says he wants to watch Lord of the Rings again which, hell, yeah, I’m there for that. I’m thinking extended for Fellowship and Return but theatrical for Two Towers. That’s like the best thing to get my mind off this shit. I bring hope to men and keep none for myself.

Also, I’m looking for my soul. I don’t know how to explain it, but I think I lost it somewhere.

Yup. Netflix will advertise its shows to you on the ad-free* tier, but say they’re not ads.

Corpos figured out that onerous regulations can keep out competitors who haven’t achieved the economies of scale to pay for compliance.

They will just be kept out of the market in the US. Oligarchs gonna oligarchy.

Labels are useful on a population level and for research, but individually I think they can cause a lot of harm.

A diagnosis is only helpful insomuch as it helps you learn about yourself, but you are not the perfect encapsulation of the average of everyone diagnosed with autism. You are an individual, with a unique mix of traits and abilities, including an ability to grow & develop.

Does autism explain some of who are? Maybe! But does it explain all of who you or all you can become? Hell, no!

Learn about yourself by listening to yourself–there is no better teacher!

Every rock seen as a picture is a rock not picked up and brought home.

Dang, I wish my field had expertise that mattered! But it’s largely an unaccountable profession that gets by on PR and guild protections, I have no shot to do what you’re doing.

There was an old show, MAS*H, and the lead character was a catanekrous, unhappy, often rebellious surgeon who get away with almost anything because he was so needed in the operating theater. I always wanted to be that good at something.

ANd, you know what, in reflection, as someone who has worked his way out of a bipolar diagnosis and off of disability, I am actually kind of “that good,” or at least the system has a choice to put me in a position to help people at the expense of itself, and it chooses not to give me interviews.

But, looking at it now with my new eyes, I see that there is no amount of skill that would allow Hawkeye to exist in the system. The conceit of the show is that the military, for all its flaws, actually cares more about the welfare of its soldiers than for maintaining hiearchy and order, and I think that, at this point, that is categorically false. Nothing is every more important than the system to the system.

But you’re experience certainly does highlight how systems do work and also benefit themselves. Like you point that the people in group1 are no more skilled than people outside of it, but because they have established credibility, they can charge more money, harm their enemies, etc.

There surely must be a BEST way to care for each other, though? I think my way of caring about other is clearly superior to your way. /s

I’m not a my-team/your-team type person, or, at least, I want the broadest “team” possible, starkly contrasted. For instance, I used to go to an open mic at an LGBTQ coffee house. I thought being a leftist minority with an interesting personal history would be enough to get me “in”, but despite my best efforts, I couldn’t be accepted, probaby because I was too old for most of the 20-somethings. I personally feel a kinship with anyone who has been excluded, but it seems like most people don’t identify with anyone who hasn’t been excluded for the same reason. “What we learn from being excluded by others for who we are is to form our own group to exclude others for not being exactly like us.” I think I’ve shared that with you before (?) but I low-key hate humanity now.

I used to be very defensive about criticism, but now I crave it; largely because I can (better) consider criticism without taking it to be devaluing my humanity. I’m playing some songs tonight, and I’m curious what other musicians think, but I’m very happy with what I’ve done, so I would be looking at their criticisms as, “What could I do to improve this?” and not “I suck and everyone hates me.”

But, and again I’m sorry to retread things with you if we’ve already discussed it before, but my willingness to critique was a fatal liability in my last job.

Your lumpenprole-believer is a bit of a funny example; I’m sure those guys are out there. Terry Pratchett has a delightlful takedown of a certain brand of communist revolutionary who has absolute contempt for the people they are trying to “liberate.” I think maybe a more interesting example would be the type of person that thinks killing villagers to terrorize them into supporting the revolution would be a more apt test of your tolerance.

I think the problem with V is that what he really is a combination of Nietzschean Superman and avenging spirit, and the anarchy is just sort of tacked on… But there doesn’t seem to be very many good guides to Anarchism–maybe because it’s more of an approach than a program? I’ll have a look at your book. But I do remember the anarchists at the turn of the century, I learned about them in highschool, but they never really taught us what they believed–which is a curious oversight, no?

Re: Mutual aid. I know what it is, and I also social welfare agencies love to get on bandwagons, so they’ll reframe a clothing drive as “mutual aid” when there’s really nothing mutual about it.

I’m going to dig around to see if I can find that podcast I was listening to. Check for edits.

Edit: Check out this podcast: Understanding Homelessness Podcast https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/understanding-homelessness-podcast/6502775 via @PodcastAddict

Episode 6, I think, is the one that talks about organizing groups for self determination.

Somewhere, I was reading a criticism of the quote

Man is meant to be free, but everywhere he is in chains!

Wouldn’t it be ridiculous to say, “Beaars are meant to live in apartment buildings, but everywhere, they are outside!” Or “Fish are meant to fly, but everywhere they are underwater!”

Obviously, if man is everwhere is in chains, then he is MEANT to be in chains as part of human naure. And while there may be bears living in abandoned apartment buildings, or maybe as pets in Qatar, they are the exceptions, the outliers.

I don’t know what the mechanisms are, exactly, but the human need to cooperate and live inside a society is surely part of it. Needing groups, groups will take on a life of their own. We also crave meaning and connection, two things that groups and group-supporting-ideology can provide.

Anyway, yeah, welcome Prison Planet.

Yes! The Rock Tax must be paid!

I pretty much ignored them. They’re welcome to fire me; their loss.

That was the Microsoft Upgrade Path for me on the A+ exam. I always thought I’d learn everything I possibly could, but knowing which editions of Windows upgraded to which was just such a huge time investment for a) something that would be at most a few points on the exam and b) trivial to look up.

But, yeah, you boned yourself there.

Chalk and talk is my hell.

There used to be a weatherman on TV in my state back before the internet. I’d tune into the news just to watch the weather. Of course, it’s not at the top of the news, because then nobody would listen to the rest of the broadcast. So I sit through that, then the weatherguy comes up and he starts talking about historical weather patterns and all the possibilities. Before I know it, he’s saying, “And that’s the weather. Back to you, Bob” and I’ve missed the actual forecast.

I had very similar experiences in math class. Going through things I understood, understood, understood, and then I tune out only to find out the teacher had taught something I didn’t understand and the entire experience of driving out to class had been wasted.

Teachers need students, student’s don’t need teachers.

I love listening to flamenco because the North Africa is still in it. It’s so beautiful to hear the echoes of something that happened a thousand years ago.

I also think it’s cool that the Vikings left such an impact on English culture we’re still singing songs about them.

We can from the land of the ice and snow…

I was put in geometry instead of trig and then I was throwing into calculus and physics. I never caught up with the sin and cos and radians and all that shit.

Update 2: They called me an hour before my shift to cancel my shift. I can see why they have trouble finding workers.

Damn, I had to be hit over the head repeatedly with a sledgehammer. I’m not too bright lol.

Anyway, good luck navigating this reality we’re in.

OT: I was just talking to another potato, @[email protected]. Does potato hold some significance other than as a starchy tuber?

The way i learned to live with it is to aim for creating leverage and renting it for a change in the system that strips the self gaining aspects from it

Could you give an example?

Yes, I’ll admit I don’t really understad what anarchism is. I’m embarassed by it not because of Mohawks, but because if its incarnation in me as more radical libertarianism. I did do my due diligence–I read V for Vendetta cover to cover several times, and all I’ll learned is that even V didn’t know what the hell was or how to make it happen. “This isn’t anarchy, Evey, it’s chaos.”

So it’s just people working together absent coercion?

I just watching Office Space and they had that discussion of “what would you do with a million dollars?” and Michael Bolton (no relation) says “That’s a stupid question, if everyone had a million dollars, nobody would be a janitor.”

I really love my job at fast food. Everybody’s on a team working together to reach a goal and that’s a lot of fun–I think you may have replied to that topic. I might do it for free if I didn’t need to work for money. Ironically, the only thing that makes me not willing to do it for free is the MANAGER, who is just awful. Or maybe not ironically. Maybe management is there to make sure they are extracting every last bit of profit from you, so it makes perfect sense she’s the only reason I wouldn’t like my job.

No, you took it exactly as literally as I intended it. I keep looking for “mutual aid”, but all I’ve found are big agencies who’ve co-opted the phrase. Part of the issue with society now is everything needs a website and an SEO to be found, and then it’ll be found first by scammers…

But the question about homeless people is sort of a where-the-rubber-meets-the-road situation of organization. The problem, of course, is that homeless groups are not recognized and their ecampments are raised and tents maliciosly slashed and property maliciously seized. There ARE formal acknowledgments of sovereignty in some rare instances.

I haven’t been truly poor yet, my parents have always been there to bail me out, but I don’t hold a lot of hope for my future. I’m thinking my next vehicle is going to be a hybrid mini-van I can live out of if need be, but I don’t know how I’m going to afford one.

Oh, I see, yes, I mean people instictively do all kinds of things outside of their conscious awareness, like building their identity around opposition to or difference from others (guilty). Not that some people aren’t going to notice, but it would take the awareness of an unlikely number of people to change things.