Archive for mental health

Why I Can’t Be A Politician…

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , on February 28, 2026 by chemiclord

I apologize ahead of time for the incoming rant.  It’s not meant to be some sort of manifesto or statement, but the venting of a very tired and frustrated man.

Hopefully, this will torch any dreams of getting me to run for political office.

It happens roughly every 2-4 years, but someone (sometimes from both major parties) gets the idea to ask me about running for political office.  The difference in this particular election cycle… I genuinely entertained it.

But as I sit here in a Zoom meeting listening to experts and consultants trying to give their advice to all the prospects entertaining running, it becomes increasingly clear to me that politics and political office could never be my domain without significant changes, changes that are not likely to ever happen in my lifetime.

To begin, I am not a salesman.  Anyone who has seen me trying to sell my books knows that.  Unfortunately, a massive part of the current political environment is about selling yourself to donors and to specific people.  Then it involves being a general annoyance calling people or visiting them at their homes unsolicited.

I simply can’t do it, and unfortunately, it’s a necessary and essential part of getting into office.  You need to be a door-to-door salesperson before you can be a politician.

How many out there actually like door-to-door salespeople?  But perhaps it is necessary because of the second problem, and one that is definitely a “me” problem.

See, any political campaign I were to be a part of would have to reckon with my publicly stated contempt for the “Average American Voter.”  I think the “Average American Voter” is, to be entirely blunt, an amoral, dithering idiot, and I am not willing to handwave it away by blaming our media or influencers or social media or whatever.

I’m going to dial back the clock to a memory of my early life, as I was waiting for a parent/teacher conference with my mother and father (one of the few times my father actually went to one of those meetings).  Anyway, my parents strike up a fascinating discussion with another family waiting, one that involved them angrily talking about that “uppity [insert racial slur that starts with an ‘n’ and ends with a hard ‘r’ here] taking all their money and giving it to the other [repeat racial slur here].”

Now, you may think, “Well, of course!  Fox News poisoned the well for Obama in 2008, and those anxious voters were merely repeating those talking points!”

Which might be true… if I wasn’t talking about Rev. Jesse Jackson’s campaign in 1984, which predates Rush Limbaugh’s prominence and Fox News by about a decade.

See, I know better.  Fox News didn’t make us this way.  Leftist cranks on YouTube didn’t make us this way.  Twitter or TikTok influencers didn’t make us this way.  We have always been this way; the only thing our media did was realize that the money wasn’t in telling us what we needed to hear.  The money was in telling us what we wanted to hear.

At least, for the politically invested.  The rest of us never wanted to know how anything works, don’t want to know how anything works, and frankly never will want to know how anything works.  Even better, we will get righteously angry at anyone who tries to tell that it’s kinda important to at least have a rudimentary understanding of how things work.

That is the “Average American Voter;” an incurious dolt that either by inability or unwillingness, has barely any clue what they are voting for except for the “vibes” they get, which often have no attachment to reality.  Damn near every single one of us in that “average” class has constructed an absolutely nonsense world where shadowy secret cabals are warping society to self-serving ends… while the people actually warping society work in broad daylight to the cheers of the masses that would rather blame Jews, or Muslims, or trans people, or centrists, or communists, or lizard people, or [insert whatever conspiracy you wish here].

I… simply can’t play to that.  I don’t have the temperament or the patience.

So how would I want to run a campaign?  You mean… the way that will never work?  Simply put, it would be a completely low-pressure campaign.  I wouldn’t robo-call, I wouldn’t go door to door.  I’d have weekly “town halls” if you will in whatever place would want to host me.  It would all start years in advance, not months, building the trust in the citizens so that I wouldn’t need to robo-call or knock on doors, interrupting people’s family time or dinner or whatever.  It wouldn’t be tied to any party, at least not initially. 

The goal wouldn’t be appealing to any partisanship initially, it would be finding out what was important to the people, learning and teaching how to go about changing it, and then once I knew what the people wanted, had their trust as a good faith actor, then I’d appeal to a party that best fit those desires meshed with what I’d be willing to pursue.

It would never work because that’s not what people want.  We want this mess of a reality show that we’ve had since the turn of the century, and I’m tired of listening to the griping of people pretending they don’t.

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This Was/Is/Will Be the Reason the Revolution Failed/Fails

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , on November 18, 2025 by chemiclord

Alex Laughlin has a rather interesting piece he composed for Defector that I found fascinating, but probably not for the reason Laughlin intended, and allowed me to embrace in the inner old man that I’ve been slowly becoming as I shake my head at “kids these days.”

https://defector.com/resonate-podcast-festival

The article itself chronicles the rise and inevitable fall of the Podcast Boom, as defined by the Resonate Festival, and how ironically it is perhaps in a better place now that all the big money interests are gone and they are allowed to simply be themselves.

I drew a different lesson from it, though. I saw a collection of people desperate to find some handhold for their passion project to make money and allow them to continue doing it. Podcasts have merely become the latest creative venture where people are reckoning with a depressing reality of humanity and the societies we build around themselves.

“Podcasts are dead?” The average human asks. “But I listen to Joe Rogan every day!”

That is the painful truth that quite literally every creative medium faces eventually. Just like books. Just like artwork. Just like movies. Just like television. Video games are right in the middle of that devastating sorting. Streamers are getting beaten with that reality right now like it’s a mafia shakedown.

It happens to all of us.

The discovery that the average human being could not give one single solitary fuck about creative work, with the exception of a handful of rather generic, unchallenging examples that they can nod their head to, not require a terrible amount of thought, and give them a momentary distraction before they jump back into the rat race that is their daily lives.

It is nigh impossible for anyone other than those few examples to ever make a living solely on creative work, and often times the people that do are more lucky to get that critical opportunity than simply being so good they can’t be denied the spotlight. Sure, about twenty gazillion people listen to Joe Rogan. A million billion people will happily read something from John Scalzi or Stephen King. They’ll gleefully line up to watch the next big film starring one of the Wilson brothers (I actually have forgotten just how many of them are in Hollywood right now). Hideko Kojima could be the producer of “Kojima Shits on a Plate” and have approximately seven million people desperately asking if it comes with a “Smell-o-Vision” feature.

(I want to be clear that I’m not attempting to particularly drag anyone I’m naming here. Another harsh truth that the desperately creative don’t like to face is that there are very, very few genuinely awful creators who don’t know their craft at the top of any given heap. They are more than great at what they do, even if they rose to prominence due to things outside of their creative skill set. Time to cope and accept it, Mr. I Got 17 Subs via Spotify.)

But 99.9% of the people who try their hand at creativity are simply never going to make enough and get enough of an imprint for it to their path to a comfortable life. That’s the reality, and no amount of social or economic upheaval is going to unlock more slots in the collective interest of human kind. It’s an exclusive club, and you are overwhelming unlikely to ever get an invite. That simply has to be okay, because that’s not going to change.

Now, I’m not trying to deter anyone from creating. That would be… (looks back at his bibliography) rather hypocritical. If you are willing to tear yourself apart to scream into a void, go for it. Just don’t expect anyone to listen. Don’t expect anyone to particularly care. If you get lucky, get that shot, and find a hand hold to build from, go for it, don’t look back, and don’t apologize for your good fortune.

But don’t spam social media with your links. Don’t be a nuisance trying to advertise yourself to a public that doesn’t give a fuck. Don’t be a shit heel trying to drag down anyone you think “got lucky,” thinking that it’ll help you advance in any tangible way.

And get off my lawn.

Metaphorically, of course. I don’t have a lawn. I live in a moderate apartment in a suburban commercial district.

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On Messaging…

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , on September 21, 2025 by chemiclord

For nearly the last year, the political left in America has been obsessed with “messaging,” and “strategy,” and have been very, very loud in their displeasure that the Democratic Party “leaders” aren’t doing it right, at least, not certain leaders.

There’s a degree that this obsession is understandable. We are desperate for an answer. Something we can do that will sway enough people in our direction. That we must have made a mistake, and that if we just do [x] or [y] different, that will be enough!

But let me offer this possibility: What if “messaging” and “strategy” don’t actually matter as much as we want it to, and all these beatings we’re giving each other (and ourselves) aren’t going to really make that much difference?

Strategy and messaging is fine and all, but it all hinges on a potentially dangerous assumption. That the units in play are actually competent enough to understand the message, and cares enough to take it to heart. It is not the slightest bit clear that the “Average American Voter” is either of those things.

Imagine sitting down at a chess board, and you discover that half of them are Monopoly pieces, another seven are actually glued to the board, the two bishops are both on black squares, and four of the pawns are actually on the other side of the board.

At that point, any strategy you might have had needs to go out the window.

Oh, and every five turns, the rules change into an entirely different game. The “Average American Voter” is not only dreadfully incurious, they also have the object permanence of a demented goldfish that had meth sprinkled into its tank. What they care about now is likely not what will matter to them five weeks from now. And frankly, all it would take is one squirrel with its tail on fire running past them, and all your carefully crafted “messaging” will matter slightly less than fuck all.

So, my advice? Take a deep breath. Don’t hurt yourself or others. There’s a degree that you can do “everything right,” and it’s just not going to sink into the heads of a good chunk of people. Worrying too much about messaging right now is a fool’s errand. We don’t have to do this to ourselves.

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On the “Progressive Problem”…

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , , on September 3, 2025 by chemiclord

So Chelsea Clinton is running for office.

Maybe.

Possibly.

At least, according to right wing rumor mills. But that rumor is all that left-leaning social media needed to get lost all up in their feelings, and reveal more about themselves than they realize.

Now, as far as Chelsea Clinton goes, I know next to nothing about her. I don’t know anything about her politics. I don’t know if she even has any intention of actually running for any office, much less Jerry Nadler’s seat in New York. I also don’t care. I wouldn’t care if she was running for office in Michigan (the state that I live in).

See, I’m not afraid of names. My view is that anyone who wants to run for office should run. If Chelsea Clinton has problematic politics (the fear of which seems based entirely on her last name than anything she has ever said), and the primary voters select her anyway, that tells me we have a problem with the electorate.

But I suppose I can be flippant about that because I already know that’s true. The electorate of the United States of America (and honestly pretty much anywhere) is filled with profoundly shitty people who hold extremely shitty views of the world around them. I also know that these people aren’t “brainwashed” or “manipulated” or “misled” or “distracted” or whatever. People aren’t empty vessels in which shitty content is poured into and mixed. Humans, in general, are broken in so many ways that it can be relatively easy to weaponize them for whatever cause you want.

And that is what has my fellow left-leaners scared. Deep down, despite all their bluster, they know they are a minority. They know damn well that they don’t represent more than a significant minority of the public no matter how much they claim that there are a legion of closet socialists just waiting for the right message. We just hate admitting it to ourselves, because that admission would require there is long-term work to be done, and if there is one thing the trust-fund babies who fuel the leftist and progressive themes on social media hate more than liberals… it’s work.

That’s the “Progressive Problem.” It has nothing to do with our message. It has nothing to do with the spats with “libtards” and “dirty centrists.” It’s that we don’t want to do the ground level work to make our minority a majority. It’s because then we’d have to accept there are, in fact, good faith criticisms of the model we propose. We’d have to acknowledge that things could go very wrong with our model, and actually do the fucking work to address those problems. We’d have to acknowledge that (gasp!) an all-or-nothing approach is a terrible approach to pretty much anything in life!

It would also require us to acknowledge that we fall victim to the exact same flaws of personality that we scoff at others for falling for, and that a cadre of very loud “fauxgressives” with bullhorns posting breathless screeds about Chelsea Clinton on BlueSky are probably really poor figureheads for any sort of political movement.

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On Violence and Gun Control

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , on August 27, 2015 by chemiclord

Well, here we are again, my friends.  Looking at the aftermath of another day riddled with horrific gun violence in a very public fashion.  And once again, it’s time to rev the engines on the hottest debate to flood through the laymen and women of this country… gun control.

Now, I don’t want to dismiss the issue of gun control.  I do believe it’s important.  I do believe that easy access to guns with very few restrictions and little effort to enforce those few restrictions is a very big problem.  But at the same time, it’s not the only problem, and just improved gun control isn’t going to solve the tragedies that seem to occur on nearly a weekly basis nowadays.

These sort of events, this sort of complete collapse of humanity and general empathy to another person or group of people isn’t like a visit to Dairy Queen, where you pick one thing and consider your dessert run complete.  It’s more like an all you can eat buffet, where you get a whole meal taking from a bunch of different items.

Just removing easy access to guns isn’t going to solve the distressing lack of support for mental health and initiatives that aid people with mental illness.  It’s not going to quell the increasing disquiet about simmering racial tensions and culture of fear that lead to police officers shooting unarmed black men.  It’s not going to solve the increasing plight of people feeling they don’t have any other options to affect change in our social and economic structures.

It’s all well and good to fight for stronger gun control.  But humans (especially us Americans, it would seem) have this very obnoxious tendency to win one battle, then happily walk away like we had won the entire war.  We cannot allow this one flashpoint be the only one we address in our deeply scarred culture.

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