The Man Who Couldn't Take an L

How to create a communist

I woke up today under-slept, not at 100%. I stayed up late, sacrificing the future for the present. Then I woke up and cursed him on the way to work. I don’t want to do that any more. I ended our outstanding business relationship two weeks ago and blocked his number, and I have spent two weeks having a very pleasant life. I don’t want this to keep bubbling up when I get tired. So here’s to exorcising the demons of regret and guilt and emotional hangups.

I get home and in daylight I just want to get the most out of the day. It’s a nice day, I’m in a great mood. I don’t want to go back into the mires. I want to go do something productive, lift weights. In daylight I don’t want to go back to it. But I need to get rid of it. I don’t want to catch myself saying “cocksucker” under my breath on my way to work any more. Now we’re sacrificing the present for the future.

My old roommate was a pretty clever boy. Knew him for about three years I think, but I’m bad with time. The many first times we talked, I liked him a lot – you could have a genuine conversation with him. Not a lot of shared priors, but he had the ability to carry a genuine conversation, he had his own thoughts about things, and I thought of him as a fellow traveller. We’re all just figuring it out. I liked him. Had a full blue collar education before I met him, but had decided to also go to university, to fill the existential void. I saw him grow from a troubled, but bright and clever guy with a lot of potential, to an anxious, insecure, shell of a man.

Part of all of this is guilt. I saw him self immolate and I did nothing to help him. He turned that on its head in one of our fights, which I have previously referenced: he told me, that he had often thought that I “just needed a good kick in the ass to stop sitting around wasting my life”. I have the same kind of guilt about not confronting him more, about the bullshit he was doing to himself.

On a whim, he had chosen a “-studies” type field at university. The kind of pseudo-philosophy that’s so popular these days. But I figured, knowing him, having shaken his hand, knowing him, that he was bright enough to figure it out on his own. And I was insecure in my own beliefs, I wasn't brimming with conviction. Who knows – everything I believe might be wrong, and there might be a minuscule use or truth or accuracy, to watered down pseudo-philosophy that’s being run as a giant cash grab for grant money by universities and has zero internal value. Who knows? That’s not humility, that was cowardice.

I thought he was smart enough to see through it. I told myself that he was a fellow traveller, and I should not impede on his journey. I thought I shouldn't help him, I shouldn’t just “give him the answers” but let him “learn it by doing the math himself”. I guess as some kind of way to grok how I had lived my whole life without getting the help I was always in some way screaming out for. I was thinking working things out. We are all just trying to figure it all out. I thought we were fellow travelers, but that’s again just me running away from leadership.

When he came home from an extracurricular “lets save the world” class he had signed up for, genuinely upset, complaining that he couldn't understand why the people there were all being really mean to him for no reason, saying it was because he was a white male. Even though he had signed up for it himself, and was just there because he wanted to help; I should have said: “no, you signed up for a bully class, and you got bullied. You signed up for a class on how to use social pressure to dominate interpersonal relationships for personal gain. You signed up for a grifting class. These people don’t actually want to save the world, and to the extent that you do, you are looking in the wrong direction brother. These people don’t. They just want rhetorical tools to bully people and promote themselves individually. It’s literally all a scam.”

I said something like that, but I shouldn't have sugar coated it. I should have rubbed his nose in it. That’s the kindest thing I could have done. What I did was just allowing him to fall deeper. It wasn’t really “respecting his autonomy”, and “trusting him”, as I tried to excuse it to myself. I was treating him like my parents treated me at Christmas with my dad’s family, when I would sneak out and drink 20 beers in the garage.

When all you have is a history of drug abuse hammer, everything looks like a ritualistic self destruction nail

Respecting him, actually respecting him, and treating him as a man, would have meant pulling him aside when he put up a “BLM” sign in his window, and told him he was making a gigantic fool of himself.

I avoided that responsibility and that relationship because it was difficult. I could have saved both of us. I didn’t. I knew full well. I chose not to. I made excuses.

Similarly, he also made some choices along the way.

No one becomes a revolutionary by accident. No one joins the Borg cube by accident. At some level, there is always a choice. There is always sadism. There is always a hunger. There’s always bloodlust.

I told him, in no uncertain terms, that he had experienced a struggle session and this should be a wakeup call. I told him, this is not people who want to save the world. What they have to teach you, will not help save the world. That was a struggle session dude. That’s what this is. And he understood what I was saying. He always does. He’s a clever boy. And he chose to go back anyway.

Now, did I try to fuck his sister? Absolutely. I absolutely did. But in the spirit of respecting each other as men, I feel like, he knew exactly how much and how little I was fucking, and he knew exactly who his sister is, and he dangled meat in front of a starving dog. And the more I got to know her, the less I wanted to, and I finally aborted my efforts after she asked me to read her novelization of her diaries, and I became so intimate with her thoughts that I knew I could never love her. But I suppose I can also see how that could be taken as a different kind of slight.

You know that phenomenon where you get together with people from your childhood, and you start acting like you did back then, because you pick your old social habits back up with the people you had them with? It’s a bad idea let your sister you haven't seen since you were teenagers live with you, in your late twenties.

Our falling out began not over grand politics, but something quite small and insignificant. Like it always is. I can trace it all back to one moment. I caught her lying to me, and I got angry, and I yelled at her. I caught her lying to me, in a very small way, a little white lie, that was an attempt to save herself a small inconvenience, but for me, risked me not being able to go to my brothers wedding. And I got furious with her, and I told her as much.

Ironically, she liked me a lot better after that. But with him, there was a seed of resentment sown that never got resolved, before it bloomed into full blown animosity.

The exact social specifics of the situation was, I was talking to him about her, and the whole situation, and something he said, made me spot that she had lied to my face. And then when I later caused her to be very upset and scared, because I am a big scary man with a big voice, that made him feel like I had made him an accomplice.

I think there is a general aspect of emasculation: He is the little brother, and he has had many fights with her – even fights about these small white lies she tells. And I think me yelling at her, over something he agreed with me was true, made him feel like I was stepping on his toes. As the man of the family. And I think there is a tinge of envy there as well, that he envies me being able to do something he had fantasied about. And then thirdly, I think he simultaneously resented me for making him feel like an accomplice: “how dare you make my fantasy come true?”. Fantasies are supposed to remain fantasies. Nothing is worse than having your fantasies realized.

I did to her what I should have done to him. I sat her down and rubbed her nose in it.

“what do you want me to say?”

“I want you to say, “I’m sorry I lied to you, I’m sorry I valued my own small convenience over you, and four other people I was causing a lot of trouble for, when I could have just been honest and we would have all figured it out. I understand that you get upset because it’s important for you to go to your brother’s wedding. And I promise I will never lie to you again.”

And then she did. And I imagine that was also kind of emasculating to him. Both that she admitted guilt, and that I treated her with more dignity than I did him.

Every time we talked, me and him, or me and her, they always, eventually, agreed with me. Which is very heartbreaking to me.

As far as I was concerned, we had resolved the whole thing, and everything was back to normal, and we could just continue our lives as friendly neighbors. I had put the whole thing behind me. But I also hadn’t taken an L. I had “gotten everything I wanted” and paid nothing in return, which he couldn't accept.

A couple of months later, I asked them to turn of the music they were playing while having dinner with friends, every night for a week, from 10pm to midnight, because I had to get up at 6 for my job and the walls are paper thin. This made him so angry that he started screaming at me, hitting walls, and one particular evening after we had tried to talk about it, sat up, literally all night, outside my bedroom, stewing in indignation and thinking about God knows what. When I got out of bed in the morning, he sat there on a couch, informed me that “I don’t want to talk to you” and “Fuck You”, while pointing a finger in my face, then ran into his room, slamming the door.

This fella’s 25+ years old. I’m summarizing, but I’m not exaggerating.

After this point we haven’t been able to communicate. Which was sad because I wasted a lot of time trying, after it was already too late.

I tried a couple of ways to propose compromises for our different schedules and lifestyles, so we didnt have to impose on each other, and everyone still got what they wanted. This didn't take, because at this point he was so anxious about me getting anything I wanted, would mean him getting tricked and feeling humiliated again. He had something to prove now. I wasn’t ever again about any particular thing, it was about him feeling like I had stolen his penis. And at some point, I gave up, because I was tired of having to carry both sides of the conversation, and just spend an evening doing a long monologue, where in the end he agreed with my assessment, and that I understood where he was coming from, carrying him kicking and screaming, sometimes quite literally, through resolving a basic social issue. But we never fully got to this point that I’m talking about here. I never got to talking to him about him feeling emasculated, because every time we took a step forward, he had to spend a day spazzing out like a fucking teenager, and treating me like a weird step-dad. Processing some resentment towards his missing father along the way.

I should have done more earlier. There would have been a chance. I could have prevented this. I can’t resolve it. I can no longer save him. I could if he was my brother. I could if he was my blood. Then I would die trying. But because he’s just a guy, he’s on his own.

“Every time I talk to you like a man, you begin acting like a child, and every time I speak to you like a child, you can behave semi-civilized. So I am just going to treat you like a child.”

I never told him that. But I decided it, when I gave up and just began talking down to him. I decided to move out as soon as possible, despite my other life plans, because all of my time other than work, was spent acting out this exceedingly bizarre psychodrama about him having the teenage confrontation with his dad he never had, against me. “You don’t get to tell me when I go to bed DAD”. Literally.

I want to be your friend.

I told him that. He didn't understand it. He thought I meant “I want you to be my friend. I want something from you”. I was offering him everything I had neglected. I was offering him being honest, and treating him like a man, and not sugar coating what I thought about him and his use of his time. I was offering him treating him with respect, and sharing myself with him. My thoughts, my ideas, all the things he always ended up agreeing with me about, whenever we talked. I was offering him, to be his friend.

Do you believe me when I say, that I want you to thrive? To be happy? That I only want good things for you?

His answer, after a moment of serious thought, was No. He thought I had some hidden agenda. He could not articulate what it would entail. He had no theory of mind for me. At least he wouldn't tell me.

If you sit down with someone you have a disagreement with, or a conflict, and you can admit fault: I have done so and so wrong, I overreacted, I shouldnt have yelled at her, I was over emotional and I didnt need to be that harsh. And the people you are talking to, cannot admit to any potential missteps, even accidental – then you are in the right. Congratulations. They are a bunch of cunts and you have the right of it. Your quest, should you choose to accept it, is to drag them kicking and screaming through the cognitive processing of this fact.

On one of the good nights, where I many times thought finally we had resolved it, and were friends again – because we were, once, a kind of friends. He told me, apropos of how it had been living together previously, trying to sum up my good side – mainly to himself. “I guess we have had a bunch of [cool, interesting, challenging, fun, intellectually simulating] conversations”. In the moment, that made me feel very sad, and I thought, “you just want me to be a meme machine, a human twitter account, you can just press a button on to receive a fun brain tingle. You just see me as what I can provide you, not as a person. You don’t really consider other people as being people any more.”

But I didn't say it out loud, because I no longer respected him. At some point, every conversation became a choice for me about whether to avoid him freaking out again. And we could never have a [cool, fun] conversation again.

On one of the good nights, where I thought finally we had resolved it and were friends again, he said, mainly to himself: “[well, I guess deep down] I do like you!”, and that made me feel good. I extended my hand to him, because I wanted to shake his hand. That felt right in the moment. A gesture of respect, as mutuals, as peers. As men. He rejected my handshake and instead went in for a hug. I can’t help but reading that as a rejection of intimacy. The hug looks more intimate, but the handshake feels more intimate. Hugging is social signalling to the group. The handshake is directed directly to the Other. You hug your family members you don't feel close to. If you check out the homunculus, a visual representation of the parts of the brain proportionally dedicated to each part of the human body, also known as the brain’s self-image, you will soon understand why I think a handshake is more intimate.

In this moment of him embracing me, him thinking he was embracing me, I knew he was rejecting me.

I told him I was going to move out as soon as possible. Of course, this wasn't soon enough, and things kept flaring up. I had no time left in my day to day, and lived in occupied territory. I went to work, figured out my finances, and looked for apartments, and I did literally nothing else. A couple of months. When he nudged me and I informed him of this, he got angry because he thought I was accusing him of something. When I was sincerely just trying to say: I am literally doing this as fast as I can. I literally do nothing else. We both want the same thing, we are on the same team, we have the same objective. I want to live here less, than you want me to live here. This, also, did not calm him, but only served to make him more resentful towards me. Now I was even doing his bit better than him – how rude.

When I finally did find something that could work and that I can afford, I made every effort to make the process as easy on him as possible – I was going to forego subletting the old room, which other people involved in our house sharing operation had previously not, because I didn't want to force him to live with some stranger for three months against his will, and just said, find someone you want. If I pay double rent, I pay double rent. Of course I would appreciate it if you found someone who could take it off my hands, but there’s no rush. I just want to get out of here. He, in turn, involved himself against my will in the entire process with the owner, and ultimately, cheated me out of a little more than 200 USD. He was at this point so fucked up about me, worried that I was going to extort him, that he pre-emptively extorted me in self defence. That’s the absolutely most generous view of it I can take.

A slightly less generous view of it is, ever since I reprimanded his sister, 7 months ago, he had felt that I had stolen his penis, and therefore he had to beat me at something, cheat me, trick me, overpower me, overman me, somehow, to get it back.

I hope the 200 bucks makes up for being a cockless sniveling coward for the rest of your life. Good luck pimping out your own sister to exotic tanned hipster gurus so their cool exotic glamour reflects onto you and makes you feel like you have a soul. Good luck finding a new girlfriend after this one breaks up with you in 3 months because you let her see all this, and see how weak and childish you are, and saw you lose a fight. Good luck saving the world from Donald Trump.

You cocksucker.

I’m sorry.

“yikes dude not a good look”