The State of My Affairs

I tried to force myself to write something profound as an opening. Instead, I erased the little I'd drummed up about staring at a sunset, and decided to go for point-blank. Life's weird, right? Of course, life is weird, is an understatement. The world is in an upheaval, rightfully so, and we're also passing around a monster virus. I acknowledge we're all dealing with those things, and I move forward. I don't want to turn blindly away from either topic, though, you should know, I spend every hour of my day assessing the Black Lives Matter movements, and the coronavirus movements, equally.

Life is well and truly bizarre; the least of my life that's taken the brunt is dating. What an absolute clusterfuck dating has become. Previous to March, I'd been "ghosted", a term meant to describe the void left when someone abruptly stops talking to you, twice in all my years of dating. To date, I've been ghosted nine times. So, in three months, my numbers increased drastically, and not without sorrow and mourning on my part. I *want* to write out all the gory details, but I honestly don't want to give those women any more time than they've already taken from me, so I opt out.

The coronavirus grates on all of us, I'd assume. If I'm to provide them with an "out", of sorts, dating when you can't touch anyone, it's exhausting. I'm sure, they feel similarly, at times. Though, I'll be honest, I never got the impression there was fear of making contact with me. I'm just assuming that my vibe, that of being super cautious of touch, had rubbed off many times during the dates.

I've had successes and failures. Some dates I just didn't feel connected with. Others, I went in full-bore, and that just created misery, despite being asked to open up more. Life's crazy. I'm being reductive, of course. I just can't quite crack the balance code for dating in the pandemocalypse. I suppose, it may be time to hang up the old hat for a hot minute, and stop reaching out. The conversations aren't always great, to be honest. I find that I attract women who're unmotivated in life. There's nothing wrong with complacency. I just prefer to spend time with someone with grand ambitions, as I tend to feed off of, and osmotically return that vibe, back into women with ambition.

The Black Lives Matter movement is very important to me, and I've had some relatively negative experiences in speaking out about equality. Who'd have guessed I was surrounded by bigots, racicts, uninformed assholes? The latter, I'll give a pass, to a degree, because many of my friends haven't been informed of the movement. However, I still sense underlying racism in their passivity and lack of desire to expand beyond what tripe their parents taught them, so my militancy is still intact.

Something else that's troubled me recently was, at the beginning of the riots, a black friend guilt-tripped me into speaking. I don't believe she meant ill-will toward me; however, she did damage my spirit in the process. I did my best to avoid conflict with her because I understood how she was feeling, and I learned she'd held my opinion in high regard. Effectually, she helped usher in a wave of righteous indignance I experienced after our conversation. She ended up severing ties with me because I didn't move to her liking, which is a shame because I felt we were on the same page. I just wasn't prepared to share my thoughts with the world as quickly as she was.

I've done well in life to juke people who treat me with a sense of urgency and demand; I don't like being demanded to do anything I wasn't already thinking of doing. When someone demands of me action, when I'm not yet prepared to move, it can be emotionally exhausting for me to move for them. For my friend, it took her cutting me off for me to grow tired of what I'd seen online elsewhere, and to fight back in the best way I know how: through comedy.

Have I been great at combatting racism? Naw, fuck no, I sure haven't. I hate racists, and I don't hide that fact at all. I don't consider a soft tone a good tool for change. I don't often identify with pacifists. My comedy is biting, aggressive, and underlyingly displays distrust for humanity, in a way that wholly comes off as anger. I'm aware of the way I speak, and I don't have time to mount up a large, volumetrically complicated crusade to teach racists how to be not racist.

I'd rather show everyone, through my actions and passive perspective, who I've always been, and the life I've led that shows equality and fairness is doable. I will say this, briefly, for those that are unaware. I gave my life to the black community when I was 11. My non-parental mentors through all of my teens were an affluent and powerful black couple in the Little Rock area. I was raised on a football field with their children, became a director for their non-profit when I was 17, and learned about my white privilege before the term became regularly applied to the disparity in black existence.

I put my time in for 25 years, and I raise a glass to the next 25. So, if you find me using my level of comedy against others, sparing them large arguments where they use turns of phrase inherent in all racists to "show" me they're not racist, know it's because I think they're fucking morons. My calling in life is not to have knock-down, drag-out discourse with racists.

And, I'm going to stand right in front of them and live my life out in the open for them to emulate and grow from. It's ultimately their choice if they want to change. I'm not of the mind that I'll change them with words, at this point. I'm living through my actions.