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I'm sorry for having made you felt put down. I have to say that I'm not that shocked, though. I find that the more honest I am, the less believable I come off as. It's what I was talking about before, about not being normal and whatever. Usually people, in my experience, can't make themselves believe some of the stuff I say comes from a genuine place. I have to be trying to be funny, or am messing with them, or being obtuse on purpose. Not to say that I hold it against you; I try my best to amend myself and be clear. It doesn't always work, especially when I'm trying to be really, truly honest. Hopefully I can avoid being too demeaning in the future. I don't really mind an edge in your posts, as we're really just here talking.
I find I gravitate towards things people let alone. Someone won't go to this abandoned building because there's rampant rumors of it being haunted? Surely I can be there and be alone, then, be at peace. There's a long history of people taking Christian symbols, the upside down cross is the classic example, and making them as symbols to oppose and rebel the religion. I find that people do this kind of thing all the time, to most of everything, people take things and make them mean the opposite of what they really mean. A graveyard, the resting place of souls, where the living give their last best effort towards the departed, a space of closure so rarely afforded to anyone for anything, tranquil and quiet, open to all, this space a place of evil and wickedness? What an asinine thing to suggest. And yet, it is seen as so, generally speaking. I don't know if the heart behind those two actions are the same, but sometimes it really does feel like people are in opposition to life, nature, the universe itself, and lash out against it violently and totally. Maybe it's a false assertion, but who knows. All of that to say, we like hiding as something we're not, I think, and things that assume traditionally "wicked" expressions tend to be the things most holy, and those that portray themselves as righteous tend to be the most evil. To tie that to the art piece, I think it captures all of that pretty well. There's ghosts and there's graves and a fog obscures what lies beyond the immediate surroundings, but really all the piece shows is a walk with friends. I don't know that I've ever questioned my reaction to something, internally at least, but I do feel disillusioned sometimes. Sometimes I look back on my life and realize I have nothing tangible from it all with me in the present. Sometimes I wonder if it ever really happened. I mean, logically I know it happened, but I just can't see it. The fact that it happened is all theory, at least it feels that way sometimes. I don't know that I know enough about you to make any good statements. I guess, you seem like you're good at dealing with failure but have trouble properly moving on from it, that you can live with past mistakes but can't really overcome them. You might be closer to me in that you don't let yourself move on from anything unless it's either more difficult to hold on than to let go or that your own survival necessitates that you make it over it.
I think the term "sad music" is a good point to use to show why I don't like genres all that much. There's songs about a breakup, songs about death, songs about dealing with sickness, songs about not being able to be yourself, songs about feeling isolated, songs about not being able to see a way forward, songs about a lot of sad things. The list I gave you, at least, is pretty even on topics that move me and topics that don't. Then, all of those topics can be broken down further. say, songs about not being able to see a way forward because you lost something, because you found something, because a door closed, because a window opened, because your mental illness makes it difficult to plan ahead, because there factually is no way forward, and again some of those just don't resonate with me. I don't want to insinuate something like breakup songs being worthless, because those are very important, but it's not something I'm interested in nor can relate to, even though all I really listen to is "sad music." It's too wide of a term, I think.
My main reason for turning to people of the past is to help deal with that sense of connection I so ravenously want, I think. Reading about someone sharing my interests or having the same thoughts as me makes me feel less alone. It's like I'm able to talk with them, to see how they feel and what they see, measure it against myself, measure myself against them. I can connect with them through what they left behind, with who they were, which is not one one hundredths as fulfilling as connecting with who someone is, but it is still something. I don't know what any person I've felt this way about would think about me, if they would like me or dislike me, find me honorable or putrid, but they were here and I live in their shadows. Of course, a lot of that has to do with how I feel about landscape and inheritance, as I've mentioned before. One biography that I read recently, that I will not point towards as it will doxx me, was about a guy who lived in my town. It was more about his death than his life. It follows his life, sure, but he dies just before the American Civil War breaks out when he's out in the boonies and this group of secessionists jump him. The book turns from talking about his life to tracing the effects of his death through the war and its aftermath. It's never anything major, of course, his death didn't make the Union win at Gettysburg or something, but his death is important and it changes the way his family and friends and the leaders in the community went about the war, changed what they thought about it. It's kind of scary reading something like that, having tangible evidence that my death might actually mean something. Spoiler alert: yes, the killers were identified, no, nothing was ever done despite court efforts by the family in the Reconstruction.
The reality of life is that everything is on the shoulders of all of us living it, regardless of whether or not we could have actually done anything better or different. Living requires active participation, and even the hermit who never sees anyone actively participates his absence, not to mention that his living does indeed affect the people he never sees, never thinks about, as much as the hermit tries to avoid and undercut that. So, when something happens in life, it's because you were there, even if the only thing you did is be there. Sometimes things can only come together in a certain way and no set of actions could affect the outcome, but even so, you did it, I did it. It's on your hands, it's on my hands. We all have a place in life that has been foretold for us, and we are solely responsible for our ending up in that foretold place. I would not comment on your relationships with people, I simply don't know enough, but I just want to mention that grief is the opposite of love. Grief only comes where love once was, where love can be. People need each other, to varying degrees. Your bluetooth story reminds me once of how I smacked a hard drive that had a broken partition of Windows on it and that was what it took to right the issue. Nine times out of nine, a charger stops working because it's too dirty, so unless you particularly enjoy being parental, I'd recommend trying to give your earbud chargers a very personal toothpicking.
There's something poignant about framing adulthood as results and childhood as mere action. One of my few surface-level insecurities that bothers me none but that still comes to mind sometimes is that my physiognomy has stayed unchanged since about the eighth grade. I still look like I do when I was a kid. Sometimes I worry that I am really still that eighth grade person. Which is odd, because sometimes I also frame my childhood person as completely separate from my own self, who's off somewhere else doing whatever kid me would be doing in this climate. It seems that even though I've matured and gained knowledge and maybe even grown a little, fundamentally I am still a kid, still have the brain capacity of a kid, still have the agency of a kid. Maybe, then, that's why I never seem to accomplish anything, not really. The only things I can really think of where I've "won" is a few video games I played with people sometimes. I put in a lot of effort, I'm doing a lot of things, I'm growing kind of fatigued from all of the things I've been doing recently actually and have been trying to rest, and I look back and I don't see any progress from it, in fact I can't even see what it was that I was trying to produce to begin with. I started doing something, and I look back while I'm in the middle of trying to make it come about and it would seem as though I have never started anything ever. Threats and promises are not enough for me, I guess. I always hear that life changes are supposed to make you feel different, but I never do feel different. Or, maybe my life has never really changed. Different jobs, different people, different aims and goals and beliefs and directions, different places to live, same life. It's just me. I've never been able to define any phases in my life. It's just a life, and I'm living it.
I wish I could find someone in my life who would walk around with me. I brought this up near the start, but none of the people I ever hung out with would ever want to just be around me. Sure, we walked, about five minutes to a store or to a restaurant. The only exception are a couple of times walking to look at Christmas lights with people. I could never tell someone to just walk in the park with me, and even if we did, it had to be because we were going to play some game there or play Frisbee golf or bring instruments and play or something. I just wanted to be with people, and I never quite understood why I was always denied that, why no one wanted to just be with me. I've developed this whole cultural framework about it, and while I'm both confident in the accuracy of the framework and certain the ills I see that lead to that kind of behavior are true, sometimes I do wonder if it's because no one wants to be with me specifically. Maybe I am still a kid, maybe everyone bloomed without me and it's difficult to be around me even though circumstance seems to necessitate it. But then, if I put off the view I ascribe to the world and I look at myself without any preconceptions, I don't actually see anything so fundamentally wrong with me to bring something like that about. The problem may be me, but it's in my wants and how they cannot coexist with the wants of others around me. I can make connections, but I'm not wired to make anything stable enough to last, because of stuff like wanting to just be with someone, to just sit at their house for a few hours or something. I mean, I can't even talk politics or philosophy with people because I'm always hammering on something no one else seems able or willing to connect with, I can't be too honest because I'll end up being too contrarian. Well, except for some few people online. People like you. I think if I said something like "I find 'sad music' to be unhelpful as a category" to anyone I've ever known in real life, with one or two possible exceptions, assuming I wasn't dismissed out of hand for being stuck-up, I think the conversation would quickly become "just put on a sad music playlist bro" while I'm trying to tell them I wouldn't like that, wanting them to understand why I don't and, far more than that, wanting to understand why they do. Maybe the problem is I don't really know what transaction I'm trying to have with them. Maybe wanting to be with someone in exchange for them being with me is just a bad trade and that's why no one is willing to make it. But then, I'm unwilling to trade my time for doing something stupid with them, would rather never make any transaction again than do that a lot of the time.