Good morning, good people.
I wanted to post a quick note in advance of undamming the Klammath and just… letting the river run so to speak. That is what I wanted… and then I wrote 7,500 words instead. I guess I blew the dam thing open early. I went with the flow and I’m just going to share the whole stream. You don’t have to read it. I had to write it.
Anyway, back to the Klammath…
For those of you unfamiliar with the Klammath, it is a river in Oregon which was once the annual spawning ground for a metric buttload of salmon each year. However, a series of manmade dams blocked salmon from returning upstream. What was once a pristine and spectacular natural waterway became less pristine and less spectacular and unnatural altogether.
Thankfully, an undamming occurred. The same mankind that dammed the river to hell managed to get its head out of its ass. With all of the shit thinking that led to the damming free to flow out of collective mankind’s body cavity, better thinking was able to again flow from the headwaters where brain thinking comes from.
The idea of destroying natural habitat for native salmon for some dumbass reason was able to flow out to sea, and in its place, beautiful native thoughts were able to return and spawn again…
Thoughts like:
“Hey, what if we just didn’t fuck everything up all the time and ruin every last goddamn thing that is beautiful, natural, and pristine?”
and
“Maybe we could just… leave nature the fuck alone or something?”
Native thoughts like those hadn’t been seen in the Upper Klamath since FDR was a wee lad. Plans were made, and now the Klammath is being rid of damnable dams. Four of them. Children wept. Conservationists rejoiced. Salmon play their cards a little close to the vest, but I assume they rejoiced as well. I’ve never been to the Klammath, but I’m going to venture out to see it someday if for no other reason than to see the (un)dammed thing.
With that 250-word superfluous intro, out of the way, I’m going to just be letting things flow out as they must and as they can for a while. I can tell you that I will have at least a couple dam releases, if you will – to get out. One will be a sort of emotional context and backstory. The second is more cleaning up an errant public record.
The subject has been rather public but what is known publicly is wildly off. The reason for that is because the person who tells the truth for a living said nothing while the person who preaches kindness and authenticity, showed me none of one and showed the public none of the other.
One of us was silent. The other was honest about me or things related to me a grand total of *once* in the past year.
On one occasion. In one post.
Ironically, a not small group of people reading this are here because of that post. I’m glad you’re here… You caught the only honest bus that left that station heading this way since July 2nd, 2024. There were no others. That post was merely true… and it seemed gracious and magnanimous because it was such a departure from the prior 300 days of hiding the truth.
The other party just isn’t big on telling the truth when it comes to me – and the reasons have nothing to do with me.
They know their running dishonesty is wrong. They just don’t care. They just aren’t big on honesty, integrity, character, or decency when it comes to me when there is a benefit in being dishonest and self-serving… and having people not find out how dishonest they’ve been is a benefit worth being dishonest for.
The other person’s dishonesty is like one of those Russian dolls at this point… They lied to someone about me … and then they lied to everyone about me to keep from getting caught by someone… then they lied about me to other someones… which meant they had to keep lying to everyone to keep all the someones they were lying to in private from realizing all the lying they had been doing… and with all that lying to cover all that lying, they now have to keep lying to everyone or else everyone will know all the lying they’ve been doing.
And this person talks about authenticity.
They say often – I believe it’s actually in their social media bio on at least one platform – that they want to be the most authentic person they can be for the rest of their life. That in and of itself is wildly inauthentic. Like hell they do.
There is literally not a person in their life who they haven’t been inauthentic with when it comes to me and our relationship. They see no reason to ‘correct’ that… because they don’t see it as wrong. They simply don’t see perpetuating dishonesty and inauthenticity as a moral wrong that should be righted when authenticity would have a cost rather than a benefit.
[The other party should never use the word ‘authenticity’ again unless they have some wholesale transformation in their relationship with being authentic and honest. They should probably put away the t-shirts about kindness too. Lying about another person to millions of people because you can’t handle being truthful isn’t actually kind at all.]
I, on the other hand, don’t aspire to be as authentic as I can be.
I actually am authentic.
I don’t lie. I don’t lie to my child. I never have. I wouldn’t lie to millions of people to get away with it if I had. I don’t lie to other people. And I don’t lie about other people.
I go by this really simple system. I just tell the fucking truth. It really isn’t that complicated or hard. It just sometimes comes at a price… but as I see it, values are principles you are willing to pay for; and character is what you do when there’s a cost.
Honesty when it benefits you isn’t any more virtuous than lying when it benefits you. Both are being self-serving. Neither reflects valuing something other than what’s good for you.
I’m telling you all of this because the entire undamming centers heavily on… honesty… and the truth… and correcting misperceptions fostered by deliberate dishonesty.
I was in a relationship last year which everyone here undoubtedly knows about. I was in love with the person quickly. I loved them deeply. I thought they were ‘my person’ and used to call them that. I wrote of them often. I was just absolutely perspiring my love for them.
When our relationship became public, it became VERY public, very quickly. Literally in a day… and I will freely admit, I liked the early attention… but the reasons why are not at all ones you would likely guess. There were two of them.
The first was that I liked having a platform to show how in love I was with them… how much I loved them. I liked having my love for someone I loved being seen. I liked showing it. I liked them seeing that I liked showing it. I liked it being seen. I liked the huge spotlight because I was in love with the person whose spotlight that was and I liked showing just how in love I was.
The second was that I liked showing people who cared about the other person and wanted them to be happy that they had someone in their life who wanted that too… Someone who truly wanted that for them – and only that. Someone who didn’t want a thing from them other than them and who loved being the supportive partner to a successful woman who he adored.
I wanted to be a star at being supporting cast. I wasn’t looking to raise my own star. There is nothing I give less of a shit about than being shallowly known to more people. I want to be ‘known well’ not ‘well known’.
The first time I ever wrote about the person, a definition of love just tumbled out of me without thought. I wrote that, to me, love is an emotion with a wide spectrum but at its root is a caring for someone independent of oneself; seeing someone’s light and wanting to see it shine. That definition has now been burnished to being just my understanding of love. It is what I think love is.
With that said, there were two weeks last year when the other party was very much in the spotlight. The first was the week their book came out. The second was the week of the Emmy’s. The spotlight was theirs. The moments were theirs… and, my god, I was just so fucking happy. I was just as happy as a human could be. I was absolutely blissed out of my gourd with a deep joy.
Someone I loved was having their moment to shine. I couldn’t have been happier.
I was just so happy to get to play the role of the person who feels that way.
It just overjoyed me to my bones to have someone I loved get to experience good, deserved things knowing… seeing… feeling… that the only thing I cared about as they did was… them.
The first event we ever went to together – traveled to together – was their first book signing the week their book dropped. I had bought a ticket before we were even a couple. I had just wanted them to know that there was someone in the auditorium who was there just for them, just to support them. I got the last ticket in the last row. I didn’t care. I just wanted them to know there was someone just there for them… and that was before we had even met or were even together.
There was never anything else about their spotlight or having it shine on me that I even liked, let alone coveted. Not a thing.
There were plenty of things about it I didn’t like. One, being entirely forthcoming with you, was what it did to this place...
I care about meaningful things. Meaningful emotional connections. Meaningful relationships. While it would seem good for me as someone trying to get by as a writer to have a famous girlfriend lead a bunch of people to the place where I pay my electric bill, what it did far more than that was drive in a horde of free subscribers who knew nothing about me and weren’t here because of me.
The first two phenomenons that arose with our relationship becoming public were:
1) People telling me that if I ever did anything to hurt the other party, there would be hell to pay; and
2) People saying that the other party’s first husband had been their soul mate and they would never love anyone the way they had loved him.
The second is a pleasant fiction which the other party promoted themselves for the four years before I arrived. It played well. It made for good Instagram content. It was a rewrite when the roles couldn’t be inhabited – and the other party has since said that themselves. It was Lifetime. It just wasn’t anyone’s actual lifetime.
The first… was more problematic. The other party and I have different kinds of audiences. Mine tends to skew towards… you folks… anyone who has been here a while or been with me even longer. My ‘offer’ is high emotional availability and deep emotional engagement. That attracts ‘feelers’ – and feelers tend to be high-empathy, emotionally intelligent people who are attentive to other people and the world around them. Y’all ain’t shallow.
The other party’s audience has lots of people who aren’t shallow in it too. In fact, I would hazard a guess that the percentage of their audience that runs shallow doesn’t run deep. However, given the scale, if 6% of their Instagram audience is of the type that considers Us Magazine to be a vital news source, that’s 100,000 people… and those kinds of people tend to form what are called ‘parasocial relationships’ – which are, ironically, a phenomenon that arose with television – as did the other party.
A parasocial relationship is one where someone who only knows of someone from seeing them on TV or the like feels as if they know the person in a more personal way than they do. If you’ve ever watched a show that had an actor who played a character you hated and you can’t help but think of that character when you see the human being who played them, you’ve gotten a taste of the reverse effect. People conflate their experience of observing someone from afar in an inorganic way with their everyday experience of observing real people in real life in a real way.
At the extreme end of that spectrum are people who feel like they know people they don’t actually know from a hole in the wall but who they feel like they know so well, they fly to that person’s defense over people who actually know them.
“How dare you say such a thing about a person I have never seen on the street, had coffee with, met, talked to, been naked with, or woken up next to! What makes YOU think you know them so well?”
Well, having done all of those things, probably.
I’ve gotten a fair number of comments this year from that population in other places.
As a person possessing of a brain and common sense and an adult capacity for basic reasoning, I just find it astounding that there are actual adults who can wholly believe they possess more insight into someone they’ve never met than the person who actually knows them better than any other human being ever has… and who has actually slept in the same bed with them… and slept with them… in that same bed.
I haven’t seen much of that here – but there have been a few people who were way the fuck out of their lane in chirping at me about shit they don’t know a damn thing about. I have found that… unpleasant.
Right now, I can’t fault people for not having a line of sight into the reality of the situation because I haven’t offered it. Once I have though, my window of tolerance for people casting judgment on me or giving me a hard time about something which I deserve absolutely zero negative judgment for will drop to zero.
In advance of what is to come, I will tell you this: if compassion, empathy, and restraint were Olympic events, I would have been a three-time gold medalist after the other party’s summer games last year, and I would have swept another three medals after their winter games. I have bent so far over backwards in an effort to not be here, I could step on my own hair.
I have spent – and lost – an entire year of my life doing nothing more than trying to get along with someone who never needed to do anything more than… be no more decent towards me than they are towards doormen… to make that happen.
There has never been an impediment to the two of us getting along – and there isn’t one now – other than the other party’s consistent deplorable behavior towards me and in regard to me. It has been atrocious. It hasn’t merely been the worst I have ever been treated in a relationship. It has been the worst I have ever been treated by anyone in any context at any time.
All the other party ever needed to do for us to get alone was to merely stop. They wouldn’t… and the reasons why have nothing to do with me. They are locked in a toxic marriage in which they are somewhere between a volunteer and a hostage. That toxic marriage is to their own shame; and that relationship supersedes every other one in their life.
I am just the kid caught between parents in a toxic marriage… and the mom in the equation has devolved into yelling “You’re just like you’re father!” because they can no longer discern between *me* and their terrible husband – *their own shame* – which they see reflected when seeing me.
They can’t even be the lowest level of basic polite-to-the-desk-clerk-at-check-in nice to me because all they see in seeing me is their own guilt and shame over how they have treated me… and there is nothing whatsoever I can do about that… because it isn’t about how *I* feel about that treatment… It’s about how *they* feel about having treated me that way.
I am not exaggerating. There has been no obstacle at any time to the two of us getting along on my side. Not one. We have never had an argument which was caused by me doing something to disrupt the peace. We never had an argument after which I wasn’t the person who made the effort to work it out - even though I shouldn’t have been the one to do that.
When the other person can muster even basic human decency, we get along. We never get along. Because they can’t muster it for more than even a few days.
I am radioactive to them. I bring them into contact with things bubbling within them that are excruciating. They can’t handle that contact. So they need to wipe out my existence first in their mind by turning me into a nonexistent villain and then by trying to make me not exist anywhere in the real world they inhabit. It’s all a doomed effort to avoid things that can’t be avoided because I exist and am going to continue to exist… and I’m pretty set on that. I happen to be pretty strongly committed to existing.
I just don’t think I should have to cease existing so someone doesn’t have to experience feelings they don’t like about their own behavior.
I’m just selfish like that, I guess.
[breaking here for length]