december 4th, 2021

in every hostile verbal interaction, there's the choice to put all of one's energy into either... 1. forgivingly nullifying their
own frustration, so as to continue to approach the aggressor as a humbly mistaken equal, & drive the interaction towards
a collaborative nature - & that suppression of their own feelings, while uncomfortable, may be to their benefit in the
end: an investment, with the payoff being a resolution to the situation where... the ugliness, initially manifested
by the aggressor, does not end up being taken into their being & colonizing their expression

or they can make the other choice, which is to simply: 2. drive the interaction towards a transactional nature, where one person pays
in shame for the other's validated smugness - smugness that i find quite ugly. here, the ugliness initially presented by the aggressor
seems more like a resource to be flipped by the winner into, like, social capital, if they're able. you know, with some clever
comeback. in the end, though, the winner is left ugly, albeit convinced that their newfound ugliness is merely
a harsh necessity, ultimately inflicted on them by the aggressor. so it's "not their fault, right?"

the transactional interactions seem to end with a sense of the loser being... obliterated, cast off as an afterthought, reduced to
a mere icon of whatever negative characteristic or shade of stupidity they exemplified in the interaction, & this icon is there
to distinctly serve for the reader as "something i don't have to think about anymore, because it's been dispatched." this seems
to do nothing for the loser beyond serving as "tough love," doing its best to offer raw psychological pain to indicate that
some change is expected, but not offering any actual guidance - & this is making the generous assumption that the
winner has any interest in the improvement of the other human being, rather than their own emotional profit

to me, it seems very virtuous to do one's best to be... a black hole, with respect to ugliness. something inert,
something that nullifies, something that doesn't reflect. the beauty of precisely what no one is obligated to
do. to even try to produce beauty in precise equal measure to the ugliness that the outside tries to
inflict - pure filtration, pure conversion... if not producing it in even greater measure!

really, is there anything more twisted than the act of cathartically reblogging an exchange where someone gets told off? endorsing
someone's choice of transaction over collaboration, & this endorsement is not even on the terms of the original interaction itself
but on the terms of its reduction to a pre-packaged & reproducible narrative that the reader can live through vicariously. weakness
does numbers for its entertaining quality while it reinforces the same old comfily unforgiving cynicism & refusal to see any "third
way out" that might miraculously shock both participants in the plain mutual relief it offers. it's just the stupid Jerry Springer show

december 5th, 2021

basically the adversaries on the internet share the uniform objective of goading
you into not thinking like kurt vonnegut. once you react to them by not thinking
like kurt vonnegut that's when they're winning & you're both losing