Do You Deserve Love?

When I was a teenager, in high school, there was a popular expression that was shared online, or written in notebooks, or said aloud. It was a saying that was said. The saying went like this: “If you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best.” Only girls and young women were saying this saying. I’ve never heard a boy or man say it, and I think it’s safe to say that it was only girls who used this phrase. I was just a simple teenage boy, starting to like girls more seriously, dating, wanting to date sometimes but getting rejected, breaking up, and all that. You know, typical high school stuff. 

Throughout all that, I kept seeing this phrase again and again, and I found it quite odd, even back then. What does it mean? Since it was always posted by girls, I assumed it was directed at boys and men, and I was a boy. I’m supposed to “handle” the girl at her worst, and if I’m unable to do that, then I don’t deserve her at her best. Okay. Why is this stipulation even being made? What is her “worst?” Maybe I don’t want to handle her at her worst, if her worst is particularly bad. There were always unstated assumptions that the “best” was worth the “worst,” and that the other party wants to engage in this worst/best arrangement. They might not even want to, let alone “can’t” and “deserve.” 

It’s kind of a reverse-deserving situation, if you overthink about it [which I do]. Like, because your best is supposedly so amazing, you deserve to have someone handle your worst. It always seemed like a slight justification for shitty behavior, though I don’t know if it actually manifested into any actual extra-shitty behavior. The best justifies the worst type of thing.

As I got a bit older, the phrase fell out of fashion. It even became popular to make fun of it in memes. If you can’t handle me at my X, then you don’t deserve me at my Y. Insert words or pictures for X and Y, and you’ve got yourself a meme. 

But people still talked about “deserving” in a romantic sense. “You deserve better,” “You deserve someone who treats you right,” “You deserve someone who appreciates you,” “You deserve someone who treats you as a priority,” “You deserve love,” and so on. Young women say these things to each other a lot, but friends have also said these things to me. And my question is: why would those things be true? Why do I deserve love? What about me makes me deserving of love?

I mean, I’m a decent person, I try to do the right thing, I try to treat people right, I make people laugh a lot, and I do interesting things. That’s fine, but why would I then deserve love? Sure, it would be nice if I met someone, fell in love with them, and they loved me back. That would be awesome, but I’m still very hesitant to say that I deserve love. Being a decent person doesn’t mean you deserve love. Being a decent person just means you’re a decent person. 

Now, some people who say these things are just being nice, just being encouraging. But some really do believe it. They believe that everyone deserves love, and when someone doesn’t find love, it’s a tragedy. But this deserving is always a general deserving and not a specific deserving. You deserve to be loved by someone, but you don’t deserve love from any given person. In fact, people are often repulsed by the idea of deserving a specific person’s love. Just because you love someone doesn’t mean you’re entitled to them loving you back. You don’t deserve their love because of your love. 

I like to think of it as a quantum mechanical wave function collapse, which I don’t fully understand. I’ll briefly explain. A particle doesn’t behave like a small version of the things we can see and touch, like a marble. It behaves quite differently. We can see a marble’s position as it moves around. But with particles, there’s not a obviously defined position of the particle. It’s more like a “cloud” of probability of where the particle is. At a specific time, when an “observation” occurs, the cloud collapses to a single point, and that’s the particle’s location. I think of love in a similar way. We each have a cloud of love-deserving. Some parts of the cloud mean that we find love, and other parts of the cloud, we don’t. You have this cloud of love-deserving, but when an individual comes into your life, the cloud collapses into a single point, and that point’s position indicates whether they love you or not. Make sense?

In this way of thinking, you both deserve and don’t deserve love. The problem, then, is this: even if you deserve love, in general, it doesn’t mean anything if no one actually loves you. You may have this cloud of love-deserving-probability, but if it always collapses to the area where the person doesn’t love you back, then it doesn’t matter that you have the cloud at all. If time and time again, you never find love, then there’s no point in being deserving of love. It’s just an empty promise.

So my real thoughts are this: the idea that you or I or anyone deserves love is not a worthwhile idea. And perhaps “deserving” is not something you can achieve, but it is something you can lose. You can’t positively deserve someone’s love, but you can definitely not deserve their love by mistreatment and abuse.

Some Quick Thoughts on Anarchism and Chaos

I’ve been reading this book called The Social Instinct by Nichola Raihani, a psychologist who researches the evolution of cooperation of various species. That’s what the book is about, cooperation. Cooperation between members of a given species, cooperation between different species, the evolutionary source of cooperation, and comparing human cooperation to that of other species. It’s quite fascinating and well-written. I highly recommend it. It’s not too science-y, but she still gives a lot of interesting information.

Before I get to my main point, I want to just share a quick example from the book. She talks about the different social tendencies between chimpanzees and humans. Chimps don’t compare themselves to other chimps. They don’t really care if another chimp has more stuff than they do. Humans, on the other hand, do compare ourselves with each other, and we do care about someone having more stuff than us.

She mentioned a study wherein children sit opposite each other. There’s a contraption with candy in the middle [kids like candy]. One child can press a button to release the candy to the two kids, or another button where neither of the kids gets any candy. So you’d think the kid would always push the button to get candy. But here’s the thing: the contraption is designed to give the button-pusher a lot less candy than the other kid. Because of this inequity, a lot of kids opt for no candy at all. Kind of interesting.

Anyway, Nichola also wrote about the mutiny on the Bounty, to discuss rebellion and authority and such. The Bounty was an 18th century merchant ship, and there was a famous mutiny. She explained that mutiny was a common threat around this time. Most merchant ships were owned by rich guys, and rich guys didn’t usually want to sail the dangerous seas themselves, they just wanted to make more money. So they buy the ship and they hire the crew. But they didn’t want to hire a bunch of random sailors because they might be dishonest and steal and whatnot. So they hire a captain, whose monetary interests align with the rich guy, to have absolute power over the ship, maintain order, make sure the job is done and all that. But if the captain is an asshole, there’s the threat of mutiny. 

Okay, that all makes sense. Then she writes about pirates and how pirate ships are organized differently, and how the people cooperate differently. She writes, “for the most part, life was actually more peaceful and less anarchic than on the merchant ships.” She then describes how pirates often engaged in self-governance, direct democracy, common ownership of the ship. You know, things that anarchists advocate for. She describes pirates as less anarchic than merchant ships, then shows them to be more aligned with anarchist-ish things. 

She’s using the term “anarchic” to mean “chaotic” instead of “having to do with anarchy or anarchism.” That’s quite common, and that’s what I want to talk about. Some people use the words anarchy, anarchism, or anarchist to simply mean chaos. Even the Joker, in The Dark Knight, calls himself an agent of chaos before telling Harvey Dent to “introduce a little anarchy.”

Now I don’t call myself an anarchist, but I’ve listened to plenty of anarchists, I know a few anarchists, and I’ve read a bit of anarchist literature. None of them, at any point, have ever said, “Hey, you know what I want in society? Just a whole bunch of chaos. Let’s just make things more chaotic, that sounds like a good idea.” In fact, they usually want a more organized society. They usually want basic needs of the people in society to be met. The provision of basic needs to everyone is a chaos-reducing practice. They want to organize truly democratic institutions, they want to dismantle unjust hierarchies like racism. Racism can cause some chaos, among other things, wouldn’t you say? So maybe if we had less of it, we’d have less chaos. That would be cool, I think.

Anarchism is different things to different people, but it’s rarely just an advocation of chaos for no reason. Some anarchists have some cool slogans, too! One is that anarchism is “democracy taken seriously.” That’s kind of a cool one. It’s like, democracy’s cool, I like that. Taken seriously? That’s kind of an interesting thought, tell me more!

There’s another one which goes, “I am an Anarchist not because I believe Anarchism is the final goal, but because there is no such thing as a final goal.” Wow, that’s a cool quote. And it’s from a guy named Rudolf Rocker, which is a cool name. And I like that quote because it reflects my attitude about politics and society as well. The point of being a political person is not to hold the correct opinions on everything [though we should try our best], nor is it to “achieve” a certain type of society, wiping our hands like the job is complete. Society will change as long as it exists, and the goal is to make it better, not to just think correctly about it or achieve something and then walk away. And of course, we’re each guided by our -ism’s that we believe in.

So yeah, I like that quote.

Now you might think that anarchism is silly or unrealistic or whatever, but it would probably be best to understand what it is and what anarchists are actually saying. It’s not just a whole bunch of chaos flying around. My first introduction to an actual anarchist was a YouTube channel called Non-Compete, in his best video [in my opinion]: “Why are you working 8 hours per day?” It’s a fantastic introductory video to thinking about lefty thought. And hey, my name is Lefty! 

So check out some anarchists, listen to what they have to say. You don’t have to agree with them, I’m not pressuring you to agree, but it’s well worth it to at least understand them.

Oh! Another thing. There was that funny story about a guy who defaced his own property with “Biden 2020,” and then an anarchist symbol. That was so funny. It was a prime example of totally not understanding what anarchists actually believe. He just thought, “Hey, the far-right loves Trump, right? So that means that the far left loves Biden. Right?” No. Anarchists don’t love Biden.

Things Might Be Better, But They’re Still Bad [and that’s difficult to accept]

Sometimes people work really hard to improve themselves. It is difficult, and there are setbacks. Let’s take alcohol as an example. A person might drink to a point of drunkenness three times per week, on average. They might recognize this as unhealthy, and they might consider their hangovers to be preventing them from doing what they want to do in life. So they decide to reduce their drinking to only getting drunk once per month. They do pretty well for a while, but then a month comes along where they get drunk four times. They’re tempted to feel like a failure, that they haven’t made any progress at all. You might explain to them that they just had ten months in a row of moderate drinking, and even the bad month was not as bad as it used to be, but it’s hard for them to accept that, especially while they’re currently hungover. 

It’s a common experience for bad things to get better, but still be bad. Instead of feeling that it’s better, it’s common to feel that it’s just bad. It’s hard to recognize things as better when they’re still bad. 

I believe that this concept applies not just to individuals, but to socio-political issues and potential futures we might create or experience. That’s what I want to explore.

Let’s take gun control, for example. The citizens of the United States own a lot of guns. A lot of our fascination with, ownership of, and culture surrounding guns stems from a single sentence: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. That sentence was ratified as an amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1791.  Different states have different laws concerning who can buy a gun, what they need to do in order to do that, the types of guns that are available, and what they’re allowed to do with that gun. In general, though, people are able to get guns in the United States. Currently, there are more civilian guns in the United States than there are civilians. 

Gun ownership and gun use is a constant socio-political debate within the United States. It is a continuous debate, but it usually spikes in intensity immediately after events such as Columbine or Virginia Tech or Geneva County or Fort Hood or Aurora or Sandy Hook or the Washington Navy Yard or San Bernardino or Charleston or Orlando or Las Vegas or Sutherland or Parkland or Santa Fe or Pittsburgh or Thousand Oaks or Virginia Beach or El Paso or Boulder or Buffalo or Uvalde. 

After these events, we discuss whether certain types of guns should be outlawed, whether background checks should be strengthened, whether age requirements should be raised, whether a “good guy” with a machine gun should be stationed at every school, every Walmart, every movie theatre, every place of business, every place in the entire state. The state would be completely patrolled by the police. What’s that called?

Anyway, I do think that a big overhaul of the gun situation in the U.S. could have a significant positive impact. Do I think that it will actually happen? No, but that speaks more to my lack of faith in the U.S. than my desire for things to get better. It could get better, but it probably won’t.

But let’s say it does get better. Let’s say we implement sweeping reforms, including more rigorous background checks, higher age requirements for certain guns, bans on the most deadly guns, better red flagging systems, and a massive gun buyback program, among other things, maybe. I think all of that would limit the access to guns for potentially violent people. It would delay the access to guns for some 18 year-olds, who, by the time they turn 25, may have changed their minds. Overall, a big program like this would reduce the amount of people dying in mass shooting events. 

However, because we have so many guns already, because we have a strong gun culture, because there still may be ways around these measures, we won’t be able to stop mass shootings completely anytime soon. But just like the alcohol example, I believe we can make things significantly better, but not perfect. Therein lies the problem. Let’s say that sweeping gun reform happens, and it reduces mass shooting deaths by 50% over the next ten years [compared to the number from the previous ten years]. That would be a great improvement, but it would be hard to feel that it’s an improvement, especially after mass shootings still occur. When a bunch of high school kids get killed in 2029, let’s say, it’s no comfort to say, “Well, it’s half as many high school kids killed in mass shootings in the 2020’s than it was in the 2010’s.” 

I think almost anyone, if they could reduce the amount of mass shooting deaths in the U.S.A., would do it, but it would still feel as though we just live in a society with mass shootings, plain and simple. People react to the news, not an academic sociology study that shows improvement over the course of a decade. It would be very easy for people to say, “Look, we had all these gun reforms, and we still have mass shootings! Let’s just undo all the reforms!” It’s a perfectionist, fallacious way of thinking, that we should throw away anything that improves society because it doesn’t work completely and perfectly to remove the problem. 

It’s concerning, but it seems more likely that we won’t get significant gun reform at all, and we’ll just live in a mass shooting society for the foreseeable future. 

I feel worried about a similar thing happening with climate change. Climate change is both slow and fast, which is bad. We won’t all boil to death tomorrow, but we also need to act quickly to avoid the worst case scenario of the next century and beyond. Some bad climate change effects are already happening, and human activity right now will create impacts in the future. Climate change, and its negative consequences, cannot be “stopped” completely. Bad things are going to happen. But we can still do a lot to make it not as bad. If we had some huge societal changes with transportation, electricity, agriculture, etc., that would have a positive impact [relative to doing nothing], but we would still have huge hurricanes, floods, droughts, and people dying in heat waves. It’s gonna happen. 

So I’m worried that people in 2035 will say, “Hey, we did all these changes to mitigate climate change, yet we still have people dying in hurricanes and heat waves. I guess it didn’t work, let’s just go back to a completely fossil fuel-run society!” Things are better than they could be, but they’re still bad.

Maybe it’s not the most worthwhile thing to worry about, since we need to get those huge societal changes to happen in the first place. Yeah, I’ll go worry about that now.

I guess the wider point is that I’m trying to be encouraging. It’s hard to improve things that are really bad in your life. It takes time. It’s easy to feel like there’s no progress, even though there is. Sometimes you gotta talk it out with someone, if you can, or write it out. Might help. And I’m here for you too.

Google is a poo poo head sometimes

I have a Google account. I use Gmail. I do a lot of my writing on Google Docs. It’s a great tool. Most of this blog is first written on a Google Doc. It’s easy. It’s simple. I’m checking my email anyway, so I start up some writing. I can bring up the same writing on my desktop and on my laptop. Awesome! It’s great, it works well.

But here’s the thing. Here’s the thing. The thing is that the Google account that I use for this blog is not my main, personal email account that I use or everything else. It’s just for this. And that’s fine. It works out well. I have my normal email logged in as default on my chrome browser. Then if I want to do some writing, I’ll log onto this email in an incognito tab. It works out very well, and I like it. So far so good.

The problem arises when I take my laptop to another location that has internet like, say, a library. A common place for people to go to use the internet. It’s a decent place for writing since you’ve got all these books around to inspire you, and there aren’t as many distractions as at home, like the TV and gaming console and all that neat stuff. So I go to the library, bring up my computer, type in my username, type in my password, hit the enter key, and Google tells me, “Verify it’s you.” Like, that’s what the fucking password was for! I gave you the password! It’s me. It’s literally me just sitting there, looking at a screen with an annoyed expression on my face. It’s me. Is it so shocking to Google that people bring their laptops to different places and use different sources of internet?

That first time, I just went home. I was pissed off. The next time I was planning to go to the library, I took a moment, at home, to log into my writing account. That way it’s already logged in by the time I get to the library. It worked fine. And since I worked on that account at the library, I thought that Google would “know” that my account and that wi-fi were friends. But no. It didn’t. I still had to do the same trick again.

Imagine this at any other time. Go back to the Prohibition era. You become friends with a guy who works at a speakeasy. He tells you, “Here’s the address, knock on the door, and say this password and we’ll you in.” So you go there, you knock on the door, you say the password, and the guy’s like, “Okay, now give me your telephone number, I need to call you to make sure it’s you. So go home and go to your telephone, and I’ll call you.” You’d tell him to go fuck himself.

That could be a good comedy skit.

Anyway, Google does this shit and I guess they want it to be extra, extra secure, but in practice it just makes it annoying for people. Why am I being subjected to this? And I get it, I’m using Google. It has great features. This shit just sucks ass, plain and simple. I wish I could just opt out and say, I’m fine with just having the password, I don’t have super secret stuff on there, it’s just an account I made for writing, I don’t need ultra maximum security where I can’t fucking log in.

The other thing is, I could just put in my personal phone number, and log on. I don’t really want my phone number attached to every fucking thing I do. Kind of a pointless thing, and it makes me feel like I’m being punished for doing nothing wrong.

I remember Apple, back in the day, would punish me for doing nothing wrong as well. The iPod was a pretty big deal, and you’d plug it into your computer to put songs on it. You could manage your iPod’s library and your computer’s iTunes library. But they had this thing where the iTunes account was only allowed to be “friends with” five iPod devices. Okay, but we’re a family! We have a family computer, as people did in the early-to-mid-2000’s. Maybe they still do, I don’t fucking know. But my dad was nice enough to buy an iPod for my mom, then he got one, then we all got one. But we were fucked cause we couldn’t use them all on the iTunes account. What a sick joke, and it’s the same thing, we were being punished for doing nothing wrong. We weren’t trying to steal or pirate anything. We were just trying to hang out and use iTunes. Sometimes these tech companies are assholes.

The Different Types of Exhaustion [in the opinion of this writer]

Isn’t it annoying when people write or talk like that? “It is the opinion of this reviewer that… blah blah blah.” Weird and professional-sounding third person bullshit. But it was cool when Walter Cronkite did it as he urged the U.S. government to end the Vietnam War. Kinda badass. So, in the opinion of this writer [me], there are a few different types of exhaustion that one can feel. They have different vibes, different severities, different timespans, and different solutions. So let’s talk about that.

The first is physical exhaustion. Classic. Depending on the circumstances, it might not even feel that bad. It can feel kind of satisfying, in a way. Maybe there’s a physical activity that you enjoy, like playing basketball. And maybe you played a bunch of basketball today, and now your arms, legs, and feet are sore. Your whole body is just sore and worn out. You’re exhausted, but after a shower and a drink, your exhaustion feels more satisfying as you reflect upon your great day. Unless you lost every game. Then you’re just pissed off.

So the satisfying version of physical exhaustion is very precarious. Doing something you enjoy, like basketball, is one way to make it more likely to be a good form of exhaustion. But even then, it doesn’t work forever. If you play basketball all day everyday, eventually the satisfied exhaustion runs out, and you just feel good-old-fashioned exhaustion of your physical body. You are spent. You need rest. So you rest. It’s all you can do. You need a day off, just to chill.

And there are other ways in which exhaustion can feel “good,” for lack of me thinking of a better word. Working out is a good type of exhaustion. It can help improve your sleep, which is a big reason why I’ve been working out more during the last few months. It works… okay for me. Also sex can lead to a fulfilling form of exhaustion, though that depends [for me] on the connection with the partner. If it’s only a physical connection, even if the sex is really good, I end up feeling more empty than fulfilled. But hey, we don’t need to talk any further about my sex life. 

Obviously there are times when physical exhaustion just plain sucks. Like driving for a long time. You ever drive for hours and hours? Your legs and eyes are sore, your whole body just feels bad, and you finally get to your hotel room and you’re just like, “I am DONE.” And you just collapse on the hotel bed. Also just work in general. That shit can have you physically exhausted at 5:30, unable to really enjoy yourself. I haven’t even worked serious, hard manual labor stuff. I’ve worked some jobs that were more physically intensive and it still was fucking draining sometimes. 

Okay, the next one is mental exhaustion. It’s when your brain don’t think so good. My brain can’t make the thoughts go! The thoughts ain’t movin’ proper! Make the brain thinking happen!

Anyway, mental exhaustion is quite common in different realms: school, work, creative endeavors, the socio-political state of the world, and the general experience of being alive. School, especially higher education, is  such an incredible catalyst for mental exhaustion. I love learning things, but the amount of work and the deadlines inherent to higher education can be very, very draining. Absorbing so much information, and more advanced information, on a short timescale is tough on your brain. It’s like traffic. The more things that are going, the less able they are to go, if you catch my meaning. Sometimes traffic slows to a complete stop! There is no more going! Nothing can go. I’ve definitely experienced that in my brain cells. None of them are going. It happens when you’re trying to cram for an exam [why don’t you examine my exam-crammin’?], and your brain is processing a ton of information, but eventually it grinds to a halt. At that point, even if you keep on studying, more information cannot be held by your brain in any meaningful way. You gotta just go to sleep. Maybe you can study in the morning, maybe not, but it’s pointless to continue. Just accept how it goes.

Hey! School isn’t the only thing that gets you mentally exhausted. There’s also the undefeated champion exhaustion, WORK. You gotta read emails, you gotta write emails, you gotta think of all the words to use to fit into the bullshit corporate language. Just staring at a computer screen all day, your brain gets fried. It’s hard to get your brain to do stuff afterwards. I don’t want to even think about work right now, even though my current job isn’t that bad. 

I’ll just talk about one more source of mental exhaustion before I, myself, get mentally exhausted. I also get mentally exhausted from creative endeavors. Been writing a lot, trying to write an effing book, and sometimes my brain is all tuckered out, and the words don’t form. It’s not quite the same experience as writer’s block, but the effect is similar: the words don’t go. Writer’s block is when you have a lot of motivation to write, you sit down, but the ideas are just shitty, or the sentences aren’t forming quite right, whereas mental exhaustion is when you can’t even attempt it.

OKAY, I now wanna mention the last form of exhaustion [in the opinion of this writer]. I experienced it a couple weeks ago, and it was fucking horrible. I call it the profound exhaustion. It was a complete weariness of every aspect of myself. My mind, my emotions, my body. It was an inability to act. Not ‘act’ like an actor in a movie. But like, the inability to do. It really made me feel how much we actually do to keep functioning. I know it sounds like depression, and it did have some similarities in some effects, but a couple differences too. A depressive episode, for me, feels like a complete lack of hope in my life. Not only that, but it’s the feeling that it’s impossible that there will be hope in the future. It’s very hopeless. It’s just brutal. But the profound exhaustion was more neutral. Like, it was not good, but it felt more like nothing [other than tiredness], whereas depression feels like the worst version of how bad you can feel. 

Here’s what I did, when I was profoundly exhausted: I did eat some food and drink some water each day. As basic as you can get, but it was something. And I just watched/listened to this guy’s YouTube channel. His name’s JRose11, and he makes videos about Pokemon. Now I’m not even a huge Pokemon fan, but I did enjoy the first game, and he makes videos about the first game. He basically makes videos where he beats the whole game using just one Pokemon. It’s actually pretty interesting if you’ve played that game. He’s made dozens of videos on this, and some of them are an hour long. They’re all in a big playlist, so I just put them on, for 10 or 12 hours in a day. I couldn’t do anything else. I was just sitting and watching or lying down and watching, or just listening and staring at the ceiling. It was a few days of that. I was so worn out and numb and useless.

I call it a profound exhaustion because as I slowly got out of it, I started really thinking about what the fuck just happened. I have to be alive on purpose. Living is tiring. Life is about effort. I don’t mean that in a self-help, hustle culture, pro-capitalist way. You know those people, who think effort level explains everything in the world. They think that because they’re wrong and say stupid things. They’re saying [human] life is about [the twisted capitalist version of] effort.


But I don’t mean it like that. I mean that to be a living organism involves and requires doing at all times. You gotta eat, you gotta consume water, you gotta think, you gotta move around, you gotta preserve your ability to think and move around. Your body’s always processing things, making new cells, and those cells are always doing stuff all the time. There is no escape from effort other than a coma or death. I was just worn out from that fact. But hey, I’m back now! Putting in the effort of living! Typing things on a computer! Just what humanity is meant for!

I don’t know, I can imagine quite a bit…

For much of my life, I’ve been a pretty passionate person, a PPP, if you will. Not a “pretty” person who’s passionate, but… you know what I mean. I live well when I’m passionately pursuing purpose. A PPP PPP-ing. Okay, enough of that pointless, preposterous poppycock. 

I’m not a philosopher with a well-thought-out-but-poorly-written existentialist work. I don’t have a theory of life called Forrester-ism. Forrestism? Forrestianism? Anyway, I don’t have a well-defined system, but I have generally sought to live passionately. I want to have a passion and live fully for it. I want to put my “all” into something. I want to be engaged, focused, and striving for excellence in something. That’s a passionate life and that’s a good way for me to live. Like anyone else, I sometimes live well and sometimes I don’t live well. 

The first problem I’ve encountered is this: what is the something that you’re striving towards? What are you passionately putting your “all” into? Is it a creative passion, such as painting or making music? Or maybe it’s your job or academic field? Maybe you want to be the best dentist you can be, or study coral reefs, or bake the best cookies ever, or design cool bikes. But sometimes it’s more narrow, like you want to win a specific championship or win a certain award or love that one person? That leaves you open to the possibility that you’ll lose. But you still have to continue on. 

Another problem is how high we set our sights. Theoretically we can set our sights at infinity, and accept where we land. “I want to paint, so I set my sights on the ultimate, infinitely good, perfect painting ability. I strive towards that for my life, and however good my paintings are, that’s that.” I kind of like this idea because of its simplicity. I’m passionate about X, so I’ll strive for the ultimate version of X, and that’s it. That’s how we got Michelangelo, Mozart, and… Michael Jordan? I don’t know, I was going for a triple, single-named alliteration but I couldn’t think of another single-named “M” person that’s among the best in their field.

Anyway, Michelangelo painted awesome paintings, Mozart composed awesome compositions, and Michael Jordan basketed some awesome balls. They were all passionate about those things, they set their sights high, and they did pretty well. But, you know, Michael Jordan wasn’t practicing basketball at every moment of every day. He loves golfing and gambling and making money from shoe sales [who made the shoes, anyway?], so he was always making decisions about how much to train, how much to practice, how much to relax, how much to golf, how much to enjoy his money, and so on. That’s not even a unique feature of my prescribed passion-filled life. Decision-making is a curse we all endure. 

The point is that you can’t [and shouldn’t] do just one thing at all times. Like I can sit here and say, “Hey, I like writing. I write books. I wanna be a great writer. That’s my passion. Everything I do is about writing. There’s nothing else.” Can’t really do that. Yes, it’s my passion, but I still have to eat food, so I’d like the food to be kinda good and kinda healthy. I still have to go places, so I’d like to have a cool bike or something. What I’m trying to say is that, no matter what your passion is, there will always be surrounding things in your life, like where you live, how much money you have, whether or not you have a cool bike. The “meat and potatoes” of your life, so to speak. 


You want it to be good, you hope it’s good, you work hard to make it good, but you can always imagine it all as the perfect, ultimate version of it. I could walk to the store, buy a ticket for $2, and win $100 million. With that I could get a better apartment in a nicer place, a cool bike, and I could ride it around and such. But it’s foolish to expect that to happen, obviously. I can imagine the nicest apartment, the coolest bike, the perfect partner, nice neighbors and so on. I can imagine everything going perfectly for me, but it’s not going to, so I’m left with this difficult balance between trying for my best life and accepting/enjoying the life I currently have. For me, that imagining, that envisioning of success and achievement and a better life is part of what drives me to do it. So I gotta imagine to get myself going, but I can’t imagine too much cause that kinda fucks me up. Shit’s tough, man. I’ll work on it. I’LL BE BACK AND BETTER THAN EVER, maybe.

People Already Think You’re Stupid

You know, sometimes I feel some hesitancy about putting myself out there. My writing, my opinions, my videos, myself in general. It can be tough to fully put yourself out there. If I put my thoughts, opinions, convictions, beliefs out there, people might think I’m stupid. If people think I’m stupid, I will feel bad. Pretty simple chain of events and feelings. Unfortunately, whether you choose to put yourself out there or not, people already think you’re really, really stupid. 

A lot of people already think I’m stupid, too. Let’s look at a fun example: Mark Sargent. He is one of the most prominent figures in the modern Flat Earth movement, which gained notoriety and attention in 2017-2019, but has since died down significantly. Sargent is a flat earth evangelist. His goal is to convert people into his belief system. Now, if you’ve spent any amount of time listening to similar conspiracy believers, you’ll know that they think too highly of nonbelievers. They often use words such as sheep, brainwashed, mindless drone, and so on. Because I say that the Earth is a spheroid, Mark Sargent and his followers think I’m stupid. They think I’m just a brainless, thoughtless idiot who believes and regurgitates everything he hears. Obviously that’s not true, but they think that about me. 

Now, some point to flat-earthers as a way to boost their own self-esteem. “When I feel down, I think of flat earthers, and by comparison I now feel better about myself.” I try to avoid doing that. I do not think it is a good way of thinking about all of this. My point is this: by simply accepting the curvature of the Earth, you already have thousands of people thinking you’re stupid. There are plenty of examples of this, where one simple, reasonable belief results in a bunch of people thinking that you are stupid. To completely avoid accusations of stupidity is impossible, and any attempt to do so is futile. So you might as well put yourself out there with your art, writing, beliefs, and so on.

HOWEVER [there’s always a ‘however’], there is a danger in going too far the other way. Our first extreme is when you’re so terrified of people thinking your’e stupid that you’re crippled into inaction, and you don’t express yourself. That extreme, as we’ve said, is bad. Don’t do that. The other extreme is to say, “Well, people will always think I’m stupid, so I’ll put myself out there completely and confidently. And anyone who calls me stupid can be dismissed just as the flat earthers can be dismissed.” Here’s the problem with that: sometimes you are stupid. And you need to be told that you’re being stupid. 

I’ve been stupid plenty of times, about plenty of things. And I needed to be told, directly or indirectly, that I was being stupid. Once I understood my stupidity, I was able to grow out of it. Though I’m sure I still have some stupidities. I’ll get rid of those later.

So what? Am I advocating for some kind of middle ground? Some balance? Kind of, but kind of not. I don’t think of it as two extremes with a line segment between them, and you just have to find the center point. I think of it more as the two extremes are the points at the base of a triangle, and the best way to be is the top of the triangle. So, if you’re at one extreme, you can’t just go towards the other extreme, you gotta go in a unique direction to get to a good place.

If that’s too conceptual and geometric for you, well, I think we still explored some good points that the two extremes are both bad. Don’t do them. And if you consider the situation to be two points and a middle ground, so be it. Just don’t let fear prevent you from speaking up, and don’t let confidence prevent you from admitting when you’re wrong.

High Movie Review #14: Dr. Strangelove

All right, it’s about time to write about this movie. It’s one of my favorites of all time, I’ll just say that right out. So it was directed by Stanley Kubrick, who is kind of a strange, dark, genius type of guy. And it was released in January of 1964, which was just 15 months after the Cuban Missile Crisis. So that’s right in the era of the height of nuclear tensions. There was serious concern about the possibility of nuclear war. There’s some posturing now about how we might, this time, engage in a nuclear war. That would be, in a word, bad. That’s my opinion, anyway. That would be bad.

Anyway, let’s get to the movie. Great opening credits, showing planes flying in the sky. These giant metal objects flying around. Really crazy, I mean, civilizations have been around for thousands and thousands of years. For that whole time, and even earlier, we’ve wanted to fly. We look at birds, and we want to do what they’re doing. And yeah, we can’t do it on a personal, physical level, but we’ve been able to build these big metal rooms in which we can fly. We wanted to do that the whole time, but it took our species like 200,000 years to figure out how, but then think how significantly it advanced from the Wright brothers to the time that this movie was released. It’s an insane advancement in 60 years. Then we went to the moon 5 years after that. Insane. Technology is just advancing at incredible speeds without any brakes, completely out of control, and will probably lead to our ultimate demise.

Anyway anyway, General Buck Turgidson gets a phone call informing him that some Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper [get it?] initiated Plan R, a nuclear attack against Russia. So there were bombers flying around, he ordered the attack, then they start flying towards their different targets in Russia. The idea is that the Russians could just kill the President and wipe out the U.S.A.’s ability to order nuclear attacks. So certain generals were given the ability to order nuclear attacks. In the movie, they trusted no one to simply go fucking crazy and order genocide. Foolish! Eventually someone’s gonna do that.

The bombers can be recalled, but only by sending a message with a three-letter prefix, so that the Russians can’t send phony recall messages. Only Ripper knows the code. So the movie basically follows three groups. First, the war room, where the President, Turgidson, and other generals try to figure out what to do. Second, Ripper at his Air Force base. Third, the crew of one of the bombers. 

Peter Sellers gives an amazing performance as three characters in this film. My favorite acting performance of all time. First, we have the British guy, Mandrake, who is trying to get the code prefix from Gen. Ripper. And there’s a moment early one where Mandrake realizes that Ripper has gone crazy. And Mandrake just says, “Oh…” and the way he says it, so fuckin funny. I imitate that moment all the time. 

Then we have the guys in the plane, captained by Slim Pickens [a hilarious stage name]. He’s a good ol’ southern boy, and he even wears a cowboy hat. Great character. And he says stuff like “Russkies,” or however you spell it. I’ve heard this character was also supposed to be played by Sellers, but I’m glad that it went to Pickens. He’s the perfect. These scenes are often scored with humming Johnny Comes Marching Home, with an ominous drum. It really creates a sense of marching towards your ultimate fate, if that even exists.

Ripper embodies the most extreme form of McCarthyist paranoia. The commies! The international communist conspiracy! It’s largely that fear that resulted in millions of death in places like Vietnam and, well, much of South America. History is really quite tragic. I remember a quote from former Vice President Henry Wallace, a hopeful quote about how the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. would gradually become more alike, with each taking the good parts from the other. But, you know, didn’t really happen that way. 

Anyway, Sterling Hayden and Peter Sellers are kind of a duo, and they’re so good in their dialogue. Sellers as the flustered Englishman, and Hayden as the crazy war hawk. His entire life is war, so his only solution to the world is war, and he aims to be better at it.

The other incredible duo is Sellers as President Muffley and George C. Scott as Turgidson. The President interrogates Turgidson about the situation and realizes that they’re basically fucked, and the attack is ongoing. So the President is like “This whole nuclear plan is fucked up, and it’s totally fucking up!” And Turgidson replies “I don’t think it’s quite fair to condemn the whole program because of a single slip-up.” A single slip-up! A hilariously reductionist explanation of nuclear holocaust. It was just a slip-up. It’s like when people say “everyone makes mistakes,” like, yeah, no one can really dispute that, but what’s the mistake in question? 

So Ripper’s idea is that he’ll execute plan R, then the President and top generals will realize that it can’t be stopped, so their only option will be to go even further with a nuclear attack, destroying as much of Russia as possible to avoid their retaliation. Turgidson falls right into line with that plan. He kind of gives a utilitarian type of argument, saying that they can either have 20 million people killed or 150 million killed. It’s interesting to think about these types of calculations being made during the Cuban Missile Crisis a couple years before. Considering what cities would be most likely to be destroyed in whatever situations, how many millions of people would be killed if we do this or that. Meanwhile most of those people are just trying to get by, just trying to live their lives.

The President takes a different route. He’s like, “Well, we’re kind of fucked, but let’s try to invade Ripper’s base to get the recall code, and at the same time we’ll just tell the Russians what’s going on so they can shoot down the bomber planes.” That way, [hopefully] no one gets nuked. Just a few hundred people get killed instead of millions. 

So he calls the Russian premier, who is drunk [LOL], and tells him what’s going on. It’s such a funny phone call. Sellers is a fuckin genius. He mixes the small talk, friendly phone call etiquette bullshit with the extremely serious issue of nuclear war. It’s so funny. “Of course I like to speak with you! Of course I like to say ‘hello!’” And arguing about who’s more sorry for the situation. The world hangs in the balance! Yet they get into this weird etiquette game. I love it. Then the Russian ambassador learns about their doomsday machine, which is the ultimate nuclear weapon that will destroy all human and animal life if it is triggered. And it’s triggered by an attack.

The Russian doomsday machine is the embodiment of the ‘mutually assured destruction’ argument of nuclear weapons. The idea is that if we [insert nuclear armed country] use nukes, then they [insert enemy] will too, and we’ll all fuckin die, so we better not use nukes. But it requires everyone to play along. Everyone has to agree with it.

Okay, I think that some type of nuclear holocaust is inevitable. If it does happen, it will obviously be very bad, and probably the worst event in human history. Probably shouldn’t be thinking about this, very stressful, not good for having clear skin, which is really important in history, for me to have clear skin. So, we have enough nuclear bombs to commit a kind of species-suicide, a specicide, and homo sapiens will go extinct. But I feel like that would only happen if there was a specific plan to do that. I feel like it’s more likely that great powers would nuke each other, and then maybe, if there was some functionality remaining in our systems, they’d nuke some of each other’s allies and strategic cities or whatever. It would be horrible, like I just said, the worst thing ever, but I just feel like they wouldn’t nuke, like, northern Canada, or Easter Island, or some other remote places. I mean, I don’t know everything about nuclear bombs and their fallout and their effect on the planet as a whole, but I feel like we wouldn’t wipe out every single human unless we only wanted to do that, and I feel like we would only use nuclear weapons against each other in some kind of direct war of nations, not as a suicide mission.

ANYWAY, I paused the movie to think about all of this. And I think about how we sometimes will discuss who the most important people in human history are. It’s people like Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Isaac Newton, and so on. You’ll often see Johannes Gutenberg high up on those lists. Why is that? Well, the production and distribution of texts has been extremely important in history, and it goes back to him inventing the printing press. But we don’t still use his press to make books, and Gutenberg didn’t actually produce and distribute all the texts that came after him. But he’s just the guy who’s kind of the originator, and what came after was super important. Depending on what happens in the next century or two, we may end up with some people from the 20th century being considered a lot more important than how we consider them now. Such as, let’s say, Robert Oppenheimer! 

If 90% or 99% of people get killed in a nuclear war, then the people who survive may look back in history and see Oppenheimer as the most important person in history cause he’s kind of the originator, in some ways, of that ultimate destruction. 

Okay, back to the movie. There’s this scene where Ripper has his arm around Mandrake, talking about fluoridation of water. And Mandrake is panicking. He’s like, ‘what the fuck is happening? The world’s about to end, and I’m here listening to this batshit crazy American. Then Ripper gets up and he’s like, ‘help me fire this machine gun!’ and he says “In the name of her majesty and the continental congress!” and then he says “the red coats are coming!” Great lines cause Mandrake is British, and Ripper’s mind is just like, ‘uh, British… what do I know about Britain?’ and he just jumps to throwing out random words from the American Revolutionary War, which, you know, was fought against Britain! Makes no fucking sense!

Here’s another thing that doesn’t make sense [to me]: eventually Ripper feels defeated that his soldiers surrendered, and he’s scared of being tortured for the code, so he shoots himself to death. Then Mandrake stumbles across a scrap of paper that Ripper has written and drawn on. And it’s these repeating phrases of “Peace on Earth,” and “Purity of Essence.” Both phrases are POE, but the recall code prefix is OPE. So, it’s like, it kind of makes sense, but why not just write the script that the code is POE? Like if he wanted to have the code be related to these phrases, he would do it, he wouldn’t make it slightly off, or he’d just pick random letters. I never really got it. It’d make more sense if it was “Peace on Earth,” and “Of Pure Essence,” so it could be either POE or OPE.

Anyway, since the President told the Russians about the planes and their targets, the Russians attacked. Slim Pickens’ plane gets hit, but it doesn’t go down. However, the hit damaged their CRM 114, the device that allows them to receive the recall code. So they’re the one plane that is neither recalled nor destroyed. They think they’re doing this heroic thing of retaliating against the Russians, when in actuality they’re dooming the whole world. A big problem with war is that soldiers follow orders, even if the orders are horrible.

There’s another funny scene when Mandrake is trying to get the code prefix to the President, but he gets all hung up with the telephone operator. He’s trying to get enough coins, he’s trying to change the type of call to “station-to-station,” which I don’t really understand, but it’s still funny. The etiquette game in the face of nuclear holocaust. I do remember seeing commercials for “collect calls” when I was a kid, though. CALL-ATT, with Carrot Top. And Mandrake yells at the other guy to shoot the Coca-Cola machine for some extra change, which he initially refuses for being private property. Another really funny scene.

So there’s one plane left, and their fuel is dropping rapidly due to the fact that the plane was damaged from a Russian attack. So they have to abandon their primary and secondary targets [that the Russians know about] and go for a new target [that the Russians don’t know about]. As they’re getting close, they realize that the hatch or door or whatever, the thing that opens up to release the bomb, that thing is broken, so slim pickens goes down there to try to open it manually. The Johnny Comes Marching Home music really helps build the tension. Kubrick made some good choices of music in his movies. Oh yeah, Slim Pickens goes down to open the door, and it opens and drops the bomb while he’s sitting on the bomb. He drops a long, long way to his death while waving his cowboy hat and screaming “Yahoo!” again and again like a crazy cowboy. One of the most iconic scenes in movie history. It’s great. 

Once that happens, everyone in the war room realizes they’re completely fucked, but Dr. Strangelove is like, ‘hey, why don’t we set up a little society in our really deep mine shafts and ride out the nuclear winter?’ and they’re all like, ‘yeah, that sounds okay, especially cause we’ll have to bring a whole bunch of women to repopulate the Earth.’ Of course Strangelove throws in his eugenicist ideas into the equation, that the women should be selected for certain qualities. Then Turgidson, even in the face of 99.999% of humans about to be killed, still is talking about the fucking Cold War! He’s still a war hawk, talking about a ‘mine shaft gap.’ I guess that’s kind of the main point of the movie, the lunacy of the Cold War. Even the Russian ambassador secretly takes a picture of the big board. Then we get a beautiful montage of nuclear blasts, set to Vera Lynn’s We’ll Meet Again. 

It’s one of the best movies ever made, in my opinion. To me, it has the same vibe as a Kurt Vonnegut novel. If Vonnegut was a filmmaker, I think he’d make a movie like this. But he wasn’t, and Kubrick made this movie. It’s funny, it’s dark, it’s a brutally cutting satire. I love it. But I will say this: I did not learn to stop worrying.

The Difficulty in Dealing with Declining Depression

Depression itself is difficult, obviously. It’s just really bad. It is a serious ailment that prevents [or seriously impedes] the ability to apply treatment to the ailment itself. Imagine if you had a cold, and the cold prevented you from taking vitamin C. What if you had an infection, and the infection prevented you from taking antibiotics? That’s [partly] what depression does. There are some things that [can] alleviate [some of] the effects of depression. Regular exercise, healthy diet, and spending time outside can help. And what does depression prevent you from doing? Exercise, eating right, and going outside. It’s fucked!

And I know these things aren’t “cures,” and I’m not saying, “Depressed? Just go exercise bro. HA!” So shut the fuck up before commenting that.

Anyway, depression is fucked. It’s horrible, and there are a lot of other shitty aspects to it that I haven’t mentioned here. They’re well documented. What I really want to write about is this unexpected difficulty that I’ve experienced during a period of relatively declining depression. Wow, kinda convoluted wording there, sorry about that. How about this: I was very depressed, recently I’ve been doing a lot better, but I’ve met some difficulties in this transition that I didn’t expect. 

I’ve had a few periods of fairly severe depression, one of which almost resulted in my death. There were periods in which I was doing pretty well, and then the depression would come back. There were ups and downs, peaks and valleys, the great rollercoaster of life. Quite poetic, as all life should be. And it was rollercoaster-esque. Lots of ups and downs quite quickly. But the last few years I’ve been on a “long haul to recovery,” as I call it. It’s more of a slow and steady increase in well-being. There are still setbacks, obviously, but it’s not as extreme. There has been an overall positive trendline. Maybe not a “line” in a “y=mx+b” sense of the word. Maybe more of a logarithmic function.

What I’m trying to say is that there’s been a steady decline in depression in my life. That’s great! It’s cause for celebration! I’m happy about it. There has been an unexpected struggle with it, though. So before my first serious period of depression, I had a certain identity, a certain idea of myself. It was based on my behavior, what I liked to do, what others liked about me, what others said about me, what I thought of myself, things I valued, my experiences, my strengths and weaknesses, etc. That’s who I was, or at least who I was in my own narrative version of myself. 

And who was that guy? Well, I thought of myself as a whimsical, clever, witty young man. Kind of a “fun and fancy free” type of fellow. I liked to say jokes and think interesting thoughts. I was curious, and I wanted to increase the amount of fun in the world. I liked to put interesting, fun, strange things out there, trying to make the world a more interesting place for whoever met me. You know, kind of a whimsical shithead. It was great.

Then the depression hit, and it seemed to create this cursed version of myself. I couldn’t be how I was. Sometimes I didn’t even want to do the things I used to enjoy. I wasn’t really contributing anything positive, I felt, and of course I was aware of all of this, this degraded version of myself, and that made me feel even worse, and I spiraled down. Very bad. Bad! But now I’m doing pretty well. I’m excited. I’m thinking, “Finally! That cursed version of me is so insignificant now. I gotta get back to my true self!” I’ve had this desire to recapture my old, whimsical self for this new era. I’ve been trying to get back to the “real me,” but it doesn’t really work that way. I can’t actually do that. I’m trying to do the things I loved to do before, and act the way I did back then [or close to it], but it doesn’t really work the same way. I’m not the same. Some of the old stuff is great, some of the whimsical stuff, but not all of it, and it’s not the same. 

It’s tough, because there’s the old, whimsical me, the cursed/depressed me, and now there’s me. There’s a bit of both in the current me. Who knows, maybe I’m just trying to rewrite the Ship of Theseus. Oh! Or maybe all the parts of me, the whimsical, the cursed, and all the parts of those parts, have been strewn about, and my task now is to take the parts and forge them into something better, something stronger, like… I don’t know, what was Aragorn’s sword’s name in the Lord of the Rings? Bit odd that swords have names. You’d think they would just call it “Aragorn’s sword,” or I guess “Isildur’s sword” at the time. If I had a sword, it’d be called “Lefty Forrester’s Sword.” I guess we have done something comparable in modern times with “Fat Man” and “Little Boy.” 

Anyway, this new chapter of my life, though the depression is improving a lot, has still been difficult. It’s hard to find, maintain, and move forward with your identity after such a long period of battling with depression. Now, even though this is a difficult thing, I would in no way claim that it’s more difficult than actually dealing with the actual depression. Depression is monstrous, and it can devour you. I guess what I’m trying to say is that, even if you’re not really experiencing the depression directly any more, it can have lingering effects on yourself and your identity. It’s tough, but I’m here for you! Let me know how it’s going!

Clay Higgins

Today I’d like to write about a tweet from a Republican United States congressman, Clay Higgins of Louisiana. The tweet, posted on February 27th, 2022, reads as follows: “You millennial leftists who never lived one day under nuclear threat can now reflect upon your woke sky. You made quite a non-binary fuss to save the world from intercontinental ballistic tweets.”

Now, I don’t have a Twitter account any more, but I saw this tweet as a screenshot on some other sites. I was immediately intrigued by it because I couldn’t quite understand what it was saying. I kind of understand the words being used, but it doesn’t seem to make sense. I’m not sure what, if any, the point of these two sentences actually is. There’s just kind of a vibe that millennials are bad. But let’s try to make sense of it.

So, he starts off with “You millennial leftists,” and that’s me! That’s what I am! Of course, Republicans use the word ‘leftist’ all the time just because it’s very spooky, but a lot of the time they’re just talking about liberals, who are not leftists. He’s probably just lumping everyone together, as people do. I’ve also heard the term ‘millennial’ being used in a derogatory tone for basically my entire life. Not derogatory like a slur, but just said with disdain, in an obviously negative tone. It’s only during the last couple of years that the reverse has happened, with ‘boomer’ being commonly said in a derogatory tone. 

I’m not really a fan of either because I don’t think it’s all that funny, to be honest. Kinda lazy. It’s just like, I’ve heard so many times people just kinda be like ‘Oh! Millennials sure do stuff…’ and that’s like the whole joke. The word is just said, and if you already don’t like millennials, it’s funny to you.

Anyway, he’s addressing millennial leftists, and he’s claiming that we’ve never lived under a nuclear threat. That’s at least an interesting claim. What counts as a nuclear threat? Since 1949, there have been at least two nations with functioning nuclear weapons. Have we been all living under a nuclear threat since then? Since there has been a possibility of nuclear war since then? That is my opinion. Every single day of the last 70ish years, there could have been a nuclear strike, and every single day we haven’t had it yet.

But maybe that’s too lenient of a definition. That doesn’t constitute a nuclear threat. In order for a period to be considered a nuclear threat, a threshold of probability has to be crossed. And nuclear war isn’t just gonna happen out of nowhere on any random day. There would have to be an escalation of tensions, wars, etc. before it went nuclear. My response to that is: is that a law of the universe? 

And what is the threshold, then? One event that we can all agree upon as being a nuclear threat was the Cuban Missile Crisis, which occurred in 1962, when Clay Higgins was one year old. I can just imagine a really old guy talking shit on Higgins for not being self-aware during a real nuclear threat. That’s why Higgins is such a piece of shit, because he wasn’t a big boy when WWIII was closest to happening.

This has to be the purpose and meaning of the tweet, that I’m somehow a piece of shit for not having lived under a sufficient nuclear threat for Higgins’ liking. Like, how the fuck am I supposed to control that? Isn’t it good to not live under nuclear threat? Isn’t that one of the minor successes of the conclusion of the Cuban Missile Crisis? That people could breathe a bit more easily moving forward? 

And he says that millennial leftists “can now reflect upon your woke sky.” I really don’t understand what he’s trying to communicate here. What is a woke sky? Woke is another one of those words that Republicans just throw around. They’re just like, “AAghh! There is something woke happening here! That’s bad! Someone’s committing a woke act against me!” Again, if you already hate “wokeness,” or whatever you believe to be “woke,” then when you see the word being used in a derogatory way, you’ll be like “Hell yeah!” even if nothing is being said.

It seems like Higgins is trying to form a “you reap what you sow” type of statement. Like, you millennials sure fucked around by not living under a direct nuclear threat, and now you’re paying the price. The price is that you have to reflect upon a woke sky, which is a real, legitimate thing. I’d be curious to hear him expand on the meaning of “woke sky.” In what way is the sky woke? 

His second sentence is even less coherent. “You made quite a non-binary fuss,” what could that possibly mean? Making a fuss in a non-binary way? Or the fuss itself is non-binary? I guess he’s trying to make some vague point about gender. Millennials [I think] are more generally more accepting of different gender identities and expressions and things like that than older people, like Higgins. So he thinks that everything we do is about gender? I’m confused about this. I know a couple non-binary people, and sometimes they make a fuss about something, like their job. That has nothing to do with being non-binary. It’s not a “non-binary fuss.” If, let’s say, Millennial leftists were against a Russian invasion of Ukraine, and we wanted it to not turn into a nuclear war, would that have anything to do with people being non-binary? Conversely, does the Russian invasion of Ukraine have anything whatsoever to do with non-binary people getting more recognition and acceptance? As if Putin was sitting there like, “Man, I’d really like to invade Ukraine, but U.S. millennials are just too binary for me to do that. Oh wait, they made a non-binary fuss? Time to invade Ukraine and threaten nuclear war!”

Now, Higgins’ tweet did not mention Russia or Ukraine specifically, but it was tweeted while Russia was invading, and while Putin was posturing about his nuclear arsenal, the greatest in the world [I think]. So it’s hard to believe that his tweet, which references nuclear threats, has nothing to do with the current war. 

Okay, so what is the non-binary fuss even about, according to Higgins? To prevent “intercontinental ballistic tweets,” a surreal combination of words. Another reference to nuclear war, it seems, as intercontinental ballistic missiles [ICBM’s] would potentially be used to deliver nuclear weapons to their targets over long distances. That’s part of what makes the potential nuclear war so scary, is that these things travel very far, very fast. But he’s not talking about missiles. He’s talking about ballistic tweets, which, again, are real. Woke skies, non-binary fusses, and ballistic tweets are all real things. 

Anyway, I suppose this is some attempt at referencing conservatives who have been banned from twitter, most prominently Donald Trump. I’m not sure if he’s making the claim that millennial leftists view tweets as comparable to ICBM’s. I’d be surprised if any millennial leftists actually thought that. “Intercontinental ballistic tweets” kinda reminds me of those old Looney Tunes where Daffy Duck would send a big missile at Marvin the Martian. Then the tip of the missile would open up and it would just release a little message saying “Bang!” or “Ouch!” or something like that. Just imagine Putin writing a tweet, and when he hits “send” it launches an intercontinental missile, and it travels all the way to Washington D.C., and then it just stops and a little flag comes out, and it says “Welcome to Cold War 2.0,” that’s a ICBT right there.

So, if I was forced to try to interpret Higgins’ tweet as a whole, I would say that these are his main points: Millennial leftists [spooky] have not lived under an intense nuclear threat, and that is a bad thing. It has led to two distinct negative outcomes: the development of a woke [spooky] sky, and the creation of non-binary [spooky] fusses. Those two negative outcomes combine in a futile attempt to prevent tweets, which resemble nuclear missiles somehow. 

In reality, it’s just a word salad that makes no sense. It’s just an angry guy throwing a bunch of words that he hates into a couple sentences that have no meaning. It’s almost like that sentence, “More people have been to Berlin than I have.” Each word seems to combine with the previous word, but as a whole, it’s meaningless. 

Just for fun, I’ll make up my own tweet, in a similar fashion, against people like Clay Higgins. Here it goes: “Boomer conservatives, who never lived in fear of school shootings, can now consider their politically incorrect roadways. You made quite a 2nd amendment tantrum to change the world with high-capacity minion memes.”