Hustle
 
   
   
   
   When I use the word hustle, I refer to use of deception to get a
heartless personal payoff. Now that I am single I have been steeped for
months in the social environment of meetups, online dating and the Saturday
Market; with a growing recognition that sincerity while social that way is a
sure guarantee of being permanently single. I have never really faced this
cultural demand to deceive. Needing almost no money, minimum wage seasonal
employment and odd jobs for friends have been quite adequate, and required
no careful presentation of myself. My direct guileless appeals to strangers
to share their house always failed (until I owned a house myself), but I am
fine being a street camper and I'm good at starting a household.
   And I never attempted asking a girl out for a date; direct friendly
conversation always got direct friendly engagement. My girlhunting all
preceded the modern culture of cheap recorded media, cheap restaurants,
mocking jokes about any kind of caring, widespread drug use, computers, and
admiration for obtaining money and stuff dishonestly, that makes a sincere
ordinary person seem grossly pathetic without some kind of amoral or
condescending veneer.
   So far, every woman I've successfully befriended has met me where I lived
or where I worked; and the introduction did not involve any suggestion of us
as a couple. No successful girlfriend has met me in a neutral public venue
or through an overt pickup of any sort. For eight months I have been working
a lot of hours seeking a girlfriend in the public with little real contact
to show for it, and no feeling of being known to any new people.
   Saturday Market has been a parade of all three types of hustling; with
single people looking indifferent to intimacy, venders asking high prices
for materials that seem too personal to be given to a stranger, and
vagrants politely welcoming each other and deliberately staying desperately
poor. Some of the people from far away cities have related to me with easy
sincerity, but only for their visit.
   Meetup groups have been mostly an alienating failure also. The Book and
Social Meetup and the Parents Without Partners group overtly rejected me as
a presumed pervert, Tummo Reiki rejected me as a presumed nonbeliever, Salsa
at the Vets club was all twenty year olds, and Tantra Meetup appears to be a
collection of very sinister people. The Qigong and CFI Skeptics meetup
groups very slowly warmed up a meager level of welcome, and then suddenly
evicted me when I spoke of this topic. A woman attempting a new meetup
confused me with twenty questions about my outlook over a lively discussion
and several emails, and then suddenly erased the meetup and shut me out.
   But I've made no attempt at deception. It's fairly doubtful I even could.
The other single, homeless and unemployed people in my personal life, facing
the same pressure to be a hustler, seem to be mostly quite as unable to be
false as I am, but equally unable to challenge the cultural pressure to
hustle. Lots of people express apathetic despair about their own lack of
validating associates, and helpless indifference about other peoples'
failure.
   My tenuous but adequate odd job employment with friends, and ownership
of a house to share, still disguises my vulnerability to complete
alienation. I took a car trip recently though, with some friends, to stay
overnight at a new home of one of them. Away from all my regular legitimacy
and familiar sights, I reverted to the social simplicity and feebleness of
my youth. In a single day and a night there were no consequences visible to
anyone else, but I could see a potential disaster.
   Being that emotionally adrift is probably common to a lot of unfortunate
people; rendering them desperate enough to use a conventional religious
spell, or something similar but more modern, like Heart of Now, to fake the
emotions of having validating associates, in order to coax some of the real
thing. The necessity of formally excluding all nonbelievers from the social
sharing always destroyed the camaraderie in religion for me. The new forms
of religious ritual use the "don't ask don't tell" method, wherein the
verbal details are intentionally missing or obscure, to make unity easier to
manage, but I've been heartbroken too many times in Quaker sharing, by that
kind of deception, to join that either.
   Raising this concern about alienation as a topic with my otherwise
friendly associates inspired pity and condescending advice; effectively
invalidation. My late girlfriend was likewise about the subject; even when
faced with a loss of going dancing with me, due to the validation spell
between us at the bar going haywire. Speaking directly about my feelings
inspired her to further belittling assessment.
   But I am convinced that this vulnerability of mine is actually a network
failure; that my weakness is evidence of our mutual weakness, and that
anyone's actual confidence is evidence of a network of interlocking
validation, not an individual success. I attribute the confidence, or
insecurity, of my associates partly to what sort of link they have with me,
and view that as a responsibility to them.
   We share a one year old girl who is brutally plain about this
vulnerability, both in her random casual confidence when well networked,
and her vivid hysteria when the network gets less definable. She became
particularly frightened on two occasions, when in the presense of a very
friendly but unknown man who vividly disregarded her network belief. Like
me, she gets only tolerant pity at best, from her network people. They
encourage her to conjure an imaginary network support of some sort, or
define some matters of importance to use for real (but sly) network
appeals. She lacks the brain agility to do either.
   I lack the willingness to do either kind of surrogate emotion; due to a
horror of past social insanity in trying to be accountable to imaginary
beings, and to the industrial consequences of creating social showmanship.
I am inspired to encourage the little girl to stay infantile, and she is
fairly open to me now. I can't actually join her network though, due to it
being defined as a babysitting arrangement, a service, rather than a feeling
whirlpool of mutual validation and feedback.
   The few women that I have gotten to know in the past several months are
overtly voyeuristic in their focus on me. They are not even fair weather
friends; my feelings are just a movie. My impression is that this is just
normal human expression, that I'm supposed to not wonder at or stressed
about.
   So far, the women I have reached out to to be a girlfriend seem to
expect or even demand a hustle on my part, not an offer of friendship. They
respond positively only to brutal arbitrary confidence, if at all. If I ask
their view, they are only open to a one on one deal, that pays off for them
in specific ways that they are quite able to enumerate, and often do. They
are not open to what they or I call friendship (caring about my feelings);
that being something that only enters their life unbidden from work or
residential associates, and never involves residential intimacy.
   Because a sexual partner has access to a woman's personal space, he must
be controlled like a dog and must be overtly open to that. He can be rashly
pushy like a dog, but will get brutally commanded like a dog. Actual
accountability to his feelings is not in the plan and not a reasonable
request. A superficial pretense is possible for a particularly useful man.
   Women writing on OkCupid and Match.com are especially explicit about all
this, without a flicker of apparent conscience. One woman writing back to
me on Plenty of Fish even scolded me fiercely for writing as if I was being
honest and friendly, given that in her view that was not a real possibility.
Since virtually none of my friendly initiating letters get any response at
all, and most women break off an active exchange by simply ceasing to
respond, her view is undoubtedly common. Even the few that politely say no,
make it clear that it's because they don't like the deal they perceive me
offering.
   Confidence in presentation seems to be the critical element to any
relationship appeal, for sharing a home, getting employment, or winning a
spouse. But establishing actual mutual caring cannot come out of such a
beginning, so I have never been inclined to do that; and I imagine most
people don't. It is an invitation to be exploited emotionally. Somehow a
whole lot of people are quick to jump at an opportunity to emotionally
exploit someone else; hense the success and encouragement of the hustle
approach, whether towards someone spare changing or someone getting sexual
with a child. The recipient delights in a chance to be emotionally
indifferent and hense is an easy participant in whatever the hustler
requests.
   The really terrible paradox with this that shows in online dating is an
intense wish to be sincere with feeling expression in one's own profile and
an equally intense wish to have that be acceptable to a date who makes no
equivalent appeal in their profile. Nearly all the profiles make an overt
appeal this way.
   This also explains why "festivals" and economic aquizition are so
horrible to me and so popular, especially among women. It is rash
uninhibited voyeurism; a chance to emotionally engage without any pressure
to be emotionally accountable. All that is required is to meet the letter of
the law and pay the requested trade amount.
   I have always been seriously confused about this, particularly with
festival events and theatre. Voyeurism gets so unconditionally condemned in
conversation, it never occurred to me before that it could be such a basic
element in normal social expression, and so basic in what a woman hopes to
establish in relating to me as a sexual friend. The voyeuristic sexual talk
of some of my men friends is apparently just expression of their
willingness to cooperate; their recognition of cultural demand. This is
also the probable reason that privacy is such a casually embraced practice;
a hidden person is exempt from emotional appeals. Likewise for spectator
events and movies; the viewer can relax emotional accountability for the
duration of the event.
   This is totally sick to me, but I found another perspective on it:

   
   
                     The Purpose of Social Eventing
 
   
   
   
 
   "This girl knows what the party's all about" is a comment of a friend of
mine on this picture by Julián Callos:

   Here is my attempt to explain this, and by implication explain how I
have been seen as socially offensive.
   Unified society of any sort, but particularly a loose conglomeration of
one to two hundred vaguely mutually recognizing people, requires fairly
frequent shared focus feeling expression of any sort, ideally of a nice
feeling. This is the actual purpose of the dance club, the open mic event,
the meetup group, Halloween or the birthday party. I have never consciously
participated in this, or felt good about it when accidently drawn in.
   Someone using a unity event to solicit sale of something, sexual focus
or direct individual validation, has a poisoning effect on the unifying
spell of the event, similar to someone whispering to a classmate in a
class. If the purpose of the whispering is very explicit and very brief,
such as a request for a phone number, then it can be mild enough of a
disruption.
   Someone introducing a shared feeling focus that overtly involves a
business proposal, a political proposal, a sexual theme, or a personal
social pleading, is also a unity poisoning influence, due to forcing a split
between advocates and nonadvocates. The ideal unifying feeling expression
has no naysayers or offended people in the direct encounter. An implied out
group that is explicitly the object of derision can often get tolerance, but
it is highly risky and generally a bad idea. With a group that already has
a basis for illwill, such as a neighborhood event with some members having
called the city about others, it is especially required that the unifying
feeling choreography not be controversial in any way.
   The term shyness is confusing related to this, with many people asuming
from my behavior that I am shy. A shy person in a unifying event is someone
who avoids expressing an overt echo of the shared feelings. By avoiding
that, they fail to genuinely amplify the unifying effect of the event, and
they inevitably get physically tense muscles that hurt somewhat as a result.
This is what the picture illustrates; a girl breaking out of shyness to ease
a backache through a low key addition to a party choreography, using a
costume and simple elegant posturing. She avoids both the expressive vacancy
of the spectator and the rudeness of the self-centered interruption. She
volunteers to become an additional person for everyone to focus on, without
upstaging the main unifiers.
   I have been unwilling to play such a role with the intellectual content
of the shared expression being intellectually random or ridiculous or
overtly at odds with my own outlook, which most choices for unifying feeling
are at odds with. For example, I'm fond of the song by the Traveling
Wilburies called "End of the Line", but in doing my own presentation of it,
I had to alter a lot of the lyrics.
   The term rudeness is also confusing related to this with many people
viewing me as indifferent to being a divisive influence. A rude person in a
unifying event is someone using the unifying choreography to gain access to
people for a one on one solicitation. This can take the form of a business
negotiation, a sexual offer or a plea for exclusive personal validation.
   An immature or naive person (a baby or a man) will often do this solely
to seek direct obvious reassurance from one individual, at the expense of
the general unification of feeling of the larger society. A mature person
will establish personal assurance through a belief in their own legitimacy
as a member of their society; depending on random accidental validation or
very brief validating gestures rather than any deliberate individual gesture
in exclusion of other people. They will use a quick hug or hand touch when
saying hello or goodbye.
   Use of a continuous choreographic link, as a baby demands or as some
couples or cliques do, is generally a poison to the larger social unity, if
done with any emphasis; hence sexual expression is traditionally private
and someone showing overt sexual focus in a group social encounter will be
seen as immature and offensive. This is also the basis for the tradition of
a newly coupled pair leaving a communal, dormatory or extended family living
arrangement, to establish an isolated new home for their sexual expression.
A career or business focus likewise is a socially divisive focus that
normally presumes a separate choreographic environment.
   None of this has ever made sense to me. I am appalled by any appearance
of larger social unity of any kind, and never overtly validate it or
participate in it. No sexual or business expression has ever struck me as a
basis for choreographic separation, but rather the opposite, as a basis for
greater confidence and flexibility in including whoever is around, through
use of the direct intense feelings as a unifying focus. The use of symbolic
or theatre presentation has always seemed like a mockery of life to me, and
a mockery of legitimacy to actually present human feeling. Sexual and
business or career focus has a genuineness that has made them more
appropriate to me as something to contribute to the shared social feeling.
   Party events inevitably also include offers of mood altering devices and
materials to imbibe that incur health and safety compromises. They also
have technical overhead that requires a bunch of grim work and sacrifice
that taxes the biosphere unnecessarily. But what the girl in the picture
does is a very reasonable compromise that offends neither outlook and can
fit into encounters or events with either sort of people.
   Traditionally, the people like me end up socially isolated into
business or academic environments where everyone is making an overt
pretense of needing the result of the activity. Having developed a loathing
for arbitrary loading of the ecosystem or indirect study of anything, I
have generally been unable to fit into that, and thus end up at home a lot,
in a large group communal situation, and strangely at odds with the life of
nearly everyone else.
   
   
   
   
   
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