Kevin Rhodes Uncategorized

Dopamine No More! (I miss it)

I miss dopamine.

I miss the sweet emotion (queue up the song).

Dopamine makes us want to do things. Dopamine inspires and motivates, conveys purpose and meaning, makes us believe that dreams can come true.

Our hairy ancestors apparently needed it. Otherwise life was just too hard, so why bother to survive? Evolution said that won’t do – here, take a shot of this, that’ll get you going.

I was a dopamine junkie. I overdid it. Dopamine fuels belief, belief gets the internal resolve going, which fuels more dopamine which fuels more belief… The more you use, the more you want. The more you use, the more you need. You’re invincible when you’re on it, an anxious slug when you’re not.

The addictive cycle.

Pretty soon you’re out of touch. Your risk-reward regulator goes out of whack. The further out you get, the closer you get to the edge, the more thrilling it is. You’ve gone beyond surviving, now you’re thriving. No normal drudgery life for you. You’re the exception.

So you think.

It’s a lie. And the crazy thing is, people who have their dopamine under control buy the lie with you. They cheer for you, say you’re inspiring. You’re on a Hero’s Journey. You’re living the Redemption story – the Hollywood standard:  get a crazy idea, sacrifice everything, lose everything, everybody turns against you, you crash and burn, all is lost, everything is hopeless…and then… you did it! Happy ending! Hero worship! Glorious sunset! Stirring overture!

I miss all that.

I read an article about “dopamine fasting.” It’s an anti-self-help self-help technique that’s been making the rounds for a few years. I could see that. I’ve been working on it myself for about that long. Once I saw how dopamine had ruined my life, how fraudulent and full of lies and false promises it is, how it would keep ruining my life if I didn’t get it under control, I swore it off. No more periodic crash and burns for the sake of a survival need that started with getting our butts out of the cave to join a Mastodon-clubbing party.

I meant well, but I lapsed now and then. I couldn’t seem to go cold turkey – dopamine was too sneaky. One little hit – one idea that seemed so cool in the moment – and I was back in the cycle. So I needed safeguards, needed to learn not to trust my ideas, how to squelch my hopes, not follow my dreams. Life was still on the edge, but not the fun kind of edge. The new edge was overlooking The Void — an imminent drop into meaningless, purposelessness, despair.

It helped that I was overtaken by a dopamine-impairing neuro-muscular disease. It advanced slowly at first, didn’t get diagnosed for a few years. By the time I got diagnosed, it was like somebody else said – “I got diagnosed, and 6 months later I had aged 15 years.” It also helped that I became poor. Old, impaired, and poor – three things I thought I’d never be, and now I was. All three hammered my dopamine supply. Crazy ideas need lots of energy and money. If you’re old and impaired, you don’t have the energy. If you’re poor you don’t have the money. It helps.

No, I don’t sit around whining. I’ve learned to do things without feeling like it, learned to live without motivation and inspiration, without hope and joy. Don’t be disgusted at my crappy attitude. I’m not wallowing. I’m living an experiment. How do you live without all that good stuff? How do you rise above slug level when your brain doesn’t have the chemical it needs to keep you squirming along?

I can’t tell you, but I do it every day.

Truth is, there’s still some dopamine flowing up there, or I’d be done. Enough to keep me surviving, although sometimes I wonder. Enough that I still lapse now and then. My routine now is treat it like an annoying child – stop what you’re doing, give it attention, hear it out. And then, once it’s feeling better, go away and wait. That might be enough.

If it comes up again, try to find out why. What’s the hook? Soothe the idea, make it feel better at the source. You can’t do anything about it anyway – you’re too old, infirm, and poor, remember? No, it doesn’t want to hear that. It’s a child – it doesn’t process adult limitations like affordability or mobility challenges. It just wants to play. So go ahead – after awhile you’ll want to sit down and rest. Maybe it will pester you again, maybe not. It might go away right away, maybe overnight, maybe a couple days. Usually no more.

Dopamine episode solved.

You’re safe until your dopamine idea-maker fires off another one.

Rewind, repeat.

I’ve learned to deal, but I miss it. I miss believing, hoping, trusting. I miss having dreams and visions, feeling like I can do cool stuff. Life was more fun when it was full of magical thinking and delusion.

I sometimes think how easy it would be to get on meds — instant chemical relief for crappiness and despair. But then I think I’ve had quite enough magical thinking and delusion for one lifetime. When Nietzsche recognized that God had died, he worried that people wouldn’t be able to live without the sense of meaning and purpose that God had given them. His solution was to invent Superman.

It takes a lot of dopamine to be Superman. Lots of testosterone, too – another survival drug.

Superman was a disaster. Thanks anyway Friedrich, but we’ll sit this one out. No Superman for me.

And for now at least, no meds either. I’m more interested in finding out if you can actually live on the edge of The Void. I know, I know… it’s just another version of my old living of the edge – kind of a pathetic version at that. But despair is what I’ve got right now, so I’m working with it. I work out, do my learning and reflecting and reading, create my artwork. I do it because I do it. I do what I do because that’s what I do. No Hero’s Journey, no Hollywood, no motivational speaker self-help guru fame and fortune. Just getting stuff done whether I feel like it or not.

It’s probably a phase – another fit my inner child is throwing. I’d like to be a child again. I miss that, too. I never wanted to grow up. All the magic, delusion, dopamine highs.

But no. Here’s to survival! To the Void! To despair! To the nothingness Nietzsche was worried about!

And all that other adult shit.

Kevin Rhodes Fascism and Religion, Uncategorized

Since Government Can’t Govern, How About This Instead?

The Democrats think politics is about policy, which is why the Biden administration is in full failure mode and the next three and a half years will be an endless rewind/repeat of the Obama Obstructionist years.

In the meantime,  the federal government is in lockdown, and won’t get unlocked anytime soon. So how about the Democrats try something new?

President Joe and Senator Joe (why is Joe Manchin always the one who gets mentioned in the news? Because he’s male? Because Kyrsten Sinema is too… random?) agree that politics is about compromise and collaboration, the way politics used to be, because that’s how we get… wait for it… bipartisan policy solutions.

Only right now, Senator Joe has the upper hand as the lead obstructionist for the Republican Christian National Fascist QAnon Party. Never mind that the RCNFQP’s former leader – guy named McConnell – has openly declared that it will never work with the Bidenites and in fact has two agendas:  (1) obstruct everything the Bidenites want to do, and (2) keep RCNFQP supporters in a froth until they can install The Donald as King for Life.

In the meantime, RCNFQP governors and legislatures around the States (no longer the “United” States) are busy passing New Era Jim Crow voting laws to make sure American democracy has lived to see its dying day.

As a result, nothing will get done until the mid-term elections, which the RCNFOP will win by claiming that President Joe (a) didn’t do anything and (b) whatever he did was designed to destroy democracy. Then they’ll pass a slew of their own legislation and we’ll see if President Joe is willing to veto it – or maybe they’ll have enough of a majority to override his veto so who cares. Or maybe we’ll just stay in lockdown and the government won’t do any governing, which is what the Republican Free Market Libertarian Party has wanted all along.

Any way you slice it, we’ll have a nominal government, just not a functioning one. Also not a democratic one.

Welcome to the future of the USA. Your future, and mine.

So here’s a thought. Since Senator Joe is going to make sure the administration of President Neville… er, I mean Joe… is a total waste of time at time when the country has no time to waste, then how about if the organization formally known as the federal government does something else with all that time that’s going to waste — something completely un-political?

How about if, instead of governing, which they won’t be able to do anyway, they use the failure of American politics and the consequent failure of American democracy as an opportunity to talk about… well, the failure of American politics and the consequent failure of American democracy. Talk about it incessantly. Talk about nothing else. Nothing about it until everybody notices that’s all they ever talk about.

Well for starters, of course politicians don’t do that. It would be against the Code. They talk over the real issues. They posture. They spout platitudes. They fundraise. They keep up our flagging, demoralized, despairing spirits by filling us a steady line of bullshit about… well, you  know, compromise and collaboration and… wait for it… bipartisan solutions.

But what if the Chamberlains — er, I mean the Democrats — broke the rule against straight talk about what’s really going on and talked straight about… well, what’s really going on?

What if they spent the next three and a half years patiently, consistently, and meticulously putting forth their legislative agendas, and then just as patiently, consistently, and meticulously detailing everything Senators Joe and Krysten and their RCNFQP colleagues do to oppose it?

Build a record, in other words. Create it, declare it. Make it impeccable. Write the history of America’s final decline as it’s happening.

The end of American democracy and the installation of The Donald as King for Life is going to be an apocalyptic event anyway, so how about if the Chamberlains turn the Big Lie into the Big Reveal? Corruption needs darkness, secrecy, and ignorance, so be sure to keep the lights always on and the mics always hot. Keep an exhaustively detailed chronicle. Curate videos and sound recordings. Name names.

They could give the project a cool name — I’d vote for “The Book of Revelation.” (I know that’s been taken, but that book is really, really old and besides, I’m pretty sure it should be in the public domain by now – assuming that anything set aside for the benefit of the public still exists.)

Revelation:  all files opened, classified access breeched, proprietary information violated, everything hacked, all open source, no secrets anymore, nothing hidden, nothing unknown, the seals all broken, all safes cracked, all containers ransacked and their contents strewn across a million conference tables, all motives revealed, all missing links discovered.

Take out full-page ads of voting records. Talk constantly about who said what when, where, and to whom. Share it with the Universities. Share it with Hacker Nation and WikiLeaks. Share it with friend and foe. Share it until everybody’s sick of it. Put it in the public domain. Make it open source. Start a new WikiBookofRevelation. And make sure it’s backed up to the Cloud, on its own blockchain, copies proliferated everywhere, coded so that any time somebody tries to shut it down it replicates itself a zillion more times. Bury it in silos, shoot it into space (send it to Mars with Elon), hide it on the moon, send it out of the solar system on a new Voyager. Whatever – just make sure everybody knows everything, forever.

If the Bidenites can’t govern, it will give them something useful to do. They can at least make a contribution – as opposed to, for example, muttering and mumbling and reminiscing about the good old days when the government governed, when the citizens voted for representatives to transact the business of the shared interests of the nation’s communal life.

When was that, exactly?

I know it sounds like I’m being sarcastic, but I’m not. I honestly think it would be a good use of the Bidenites’ time – probably the only use of their time, much more useful than waiting for the RCNFQP to play nice, which everyone but the Bidenites know is never ever ever not in a million American years ever going to happen. (Not that there are ever going to be a million American years, since we have at most three and a half left.)

History would thank them.

Just think what it would be like to have a steady source of open, factual, credentialed, accountable documentary. I know – too much to ask, way way too much to ask.

And who knows… if that’s all they ever talked about, maybe somebody somewhere might actually start to wonder why.

So that’s my advice for what to do with a government that can’t govern. I realize nobody asked for my advice, that I’m not qualified or authorized to give it, and nobody will read or pay attention to it anyway, so why do I bother?

Because sometimes you just have to take a moment to scream into the void.

Even though you never, ever, ever get an echo back.

Kevin Rhodes Fascism and Religion, Uncategorized

My Wife Thinks I Should Give Up Following Politics

She’s probably right.

It’s not like I’m in a rage about it. I don’t do rage. That’s for the other side. I do despair instead. That’s what my side does — despair over how the USA’s federal government actually works. For example, I never knew that one Senator – ONE SENATOR – could completely shut down a newly elected President’s entire legislative agenda. The entire agenda of a newly elected Presidential administration defeated by one Senator – ONE SENATOR….

I mean, didn’t we just have an election that the newly elected President won? Popular vote:  81,282,916 to 74,223,369. Electoral College vote:  306 to 232. Does that qualify as a win? Only if you voted for the winner. If you voted for the loser, no. If you lost, the other guy didn’t just win, he stole it from you. Talk about a sore loser.

But the fortunately for the sore losers, the newly elected President (the one the rest of us actually think did in fact win) isn’t a sore winner. He and his cronies think that, now that we’ve put Tweet-Whatever-You-Want-As-Long-As-It-Keeps-Stoking-The-Rage behind us, politics can get back to what it was in the good old days, when Democrats and Republicans worked together for the good of the nation and compromise was king (not some  power and… um, other things… grabbing lunatic).

So when exactly was that?

I mean, politics has been politics for a long time – like when Strom Thurmond pulled his epic solo all-nighter filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and a relay team of ramblers kept the Civil Rights Act of 1964 at bay for 60 Senate work days.

Yep, those were the good old days alright.

I’m sure I would have been throwing fits then, too, if I’d been old enough to notice or to care. It’s just that now feels different, like there’s more at stake. It feels like back then people were trying to replace bad stuff with good stuff — you know, like we shouldn’t have separate “Colored” entrances and seating areas and that kind of thing. But now we’ve got half of Americans and their Nutcase-Conspiracy-Theory-Fascist-Christian-Believe-Anything-You-Want-And-Say—Anything-You-Want Party doing their best to dismantle democracy and install their King For Life (or at least 12 more years) right in front of our very eyes, and somehow that doesn’t create any political urgency to get some things done before that can actually happen — which it will if we don’t.

Seems like dinking around with self-congratulatory God Bless America bromides might be missing the moment.

Plus, we’ve got all these… well, um, issues…  that seem pretty big and daunting, and that if we could do something about them we might make the USA into something other than the Capitalist-Militarist-Speak-Loudly-And-Hit-‘Em-With-A-Big-Stick regime it’s become  — you, know, the kinds of issues that currently paralyze the bottom 90%, so that we have only two response options left to us – rage or despair. Plus it seems like if we made some adjustments we could seriously change a lot of things for a lot of people and maybe avoid an inevitable descent into the New Dark Ages, and meanwhile the billionaires could keep enough to be able to feel like nothing fundamentally changed and it would still be okay that Trickle Down never did.….  

There’s a long list of those adjustments that might possibly enable us to take a step back from the edge of the Abyss:

  • Healthcare
  • Education
  • Student loans
  • Economic equality
  • Downward mobility
  • A living wage
  • Affordable housing
  • Infrastructure
  • Accessible internet for all
  • Voting rights
  • Immigration
  • Climate change
  • Mass incarceration
  • Police racial killings
  • Domestic terrorism
  • Gun (mass killings) control
  • Campaign finance
  • The fleecing of the middle class
  • The end of science
  • Runaway defense spending
  • Nationalism/populism
  • Plastics, plastics everywhere
  • The systematic end of parks, public lands, and open spaces
  • Reparations for slavery
  • Reparations to native Americans
  • An end to misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia
  • Gender identity acceptance and kindness
  • A return of public discourse based on intelligence, reason, science, truthfulness, ethics…

And I’m just getting warmed up. That’s only the stuff on the surface. Let’s not even talk about the worldviews and ideologies and belief systems and cultural norms underneath all of that.

“Socialism,” is the one word That-Settles-It-Talk-To-The-Hand response of the Weirdest-Conspiracy-Theory-Ever-By-A-Long-Shot Party. (Well, that and “Trump in 2024” — but that’s three words assuming “2024” counts as a word.)

Meanwhile, the sole plank in their platform is, “Trump at all costs.” Impressively expansive thinkers, those Republicans….

I just never thought we’d be here, that’s all. I have this ridiculously persistent idea that we’re supposed to have a government to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”  Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America

I just never knew we didn’t.

We already lived through eight years of Obstruction Politics. That should be enough for one lifetime – enough to stomp the hope and change right out of the most Yes-We-Can hearts. At the rate we’re going, the Obstructionist Party — bolstered by all of its friends in the states who are busy passing anti-voter laws — is going to be ramrodding through its own legislation two years from now.

It’s like we should all be happy that the Nutcase Fascist Christian Etc. Man-Who-Would-Be-King-And-Is-Royally-Pissed-He’s Not isn’t officially President anymore. We actually had a few weeks there without the several times a day onslaught of Don’t Bother With The Truth… and people like me were kind of feeling like maybe we could kind of relax a little. But then Marjorie Taylor Greene stepped into the role and now we all know her name and… well, does anyone else think she’s positioning herself as the Nutcase Heir Apparent? If that sounds too pessimistic then, okay, maybe she’s just really and truly that far off the rails. But no matter, people like me definitely can’t relax anymore.

All because one Senator – ONE SENATOR – has taken it upon himself to keep Trump in power by making sure Biden can’t do anything. It would take that one Senator’s vote, together with his 49 Democratic Party Senate colleagues to end the Era-Of-Obstruction-Is-Our-Game- Until-We-Can-End-This-Democracy-Thing-For-Good.

One lousy stinking vote.

Not going to happen.

So never mind the election we just had. And never mind who won or who had it stolen from them. All that relief? All that daring to hope? We dared to feel relief and hope back in 2008. It didn’t get us anywhere then, what were we thinking this time around? I mean, really… what were we thinking?

All that thinking we might get past a federal government and its autocratic leader who thinks it’s really okay to turn the U.S.’s Don’t-Mess-With-Us military against its own citizens, and if you don’t think that’s where the Nutcase Fascist Christian Etc. Party will take us if their King returns triumphantly to the throne… well then, you seriously haven’t been paying attention.

All because one Senator – ONE SENATOR – won’t vote to trash the filibuster – assuming the newly elected President would ever ask his colleagues in the Senate to do it, which he’d rather not. After all, he has a campaign promise to keep, which means we have miles to go before we sleep. “Nothing will fundamentally change,” he promised a crowd of donors back in 2019. Right on, Joe. Looks like you’re going to keep that one.

But the rest of us, we were just kind of hoping, that’s all.…