Wanzology

The Deception

 Well, well, well! Welcome to another Wednesday. Yeah. Hi, how are you doing? This is the wands and you have stumbled into another episode of WANZOLOGY!!! Yes, yes, yes, yes!!! In the continuing saga, to figure out why the hell I think the way that I do, I thought I would share the things that I think about and how I think about them in hopes that I'll find similarity, camaraderie, maybe even community!! Or not. Who knows? All I know is that I am me, and you are you. And hopefully we can meet where those two things collide.

So I hope that you are turning into someone you desire to be and aren't like a leaf on the trees that are changing color and dying. I hope that your inner self is building. I, uh, I went to, uh, a music summit this last weekend where I was surrounded by other people in the music industry here in the local burg and I found myself, in between my ears, playing a very interesting game of comparison. Comparison. Comparison. I don't know about you, but comparison is one of the dumbest things that humans can do. I mean, when you compare yourself. Say, like, financially. If you're comparing yourself to, say, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos, or someone. Now why are you doing that? Wishing that you had all the money that they have and the power that they have. What good would it do you really? You say maybe, well, my life would be easier. Have you taken a really good look at their lives lately? Someone really famous who's got a lot of money, is their life simple or complicated?

Take a second. Think of your favorite celebrity. Your favorite famous person. Take a really good look at them. Really good, honest look outside of whatever arena they exist in. If it's an athlete, take them after retirement. If they're, uh, an artist, a singer or songwriter that you like. Look at their last album, especially if you haven't heard from them in a while, look at them very closely. What do you see? What do you see? You may not see much. I mean, most athletes when they retire, and they don't go into broadcasting, disappear. You might see them at a, at an event, you know, something special like super bowl or playoff game, or maybe on a panel for some ‘thing’. Right. But generally, you don't hear from them and artists aren't that much different. After the pool of light goes away and you're no longer as famous as you once were, I can tell you from experience. Nobody bothers you. It's nice to see you, and it's great to have a picture taken with you, but no one really, really cares about you. You make them happy because of what you did, not what you're doing. Which is fine. I mean, at least you make somebody happy instead of wanting to throw up. Right? And I say all this because last week in the news, there was a very interesting story about one Sean Diddy Combs.

Now, Diddy is not one of those people that you just heard about all the time, every once in a while. But now, now you hear about him a lot. And what you hear is pretty ugly. Pretty ugly. I mean, back in the day, I kind of avoided the rap game because I saw what it was doing to people on the street, changing their egos into something that was unrecognizable, for the most part. The representative lifestyle was not something I dug, really. Back in the day, the rap game was basically built from street mentality and I didn't grow up on the streets. So in a way I was kind of left out and didn't really understand and tried really hard not to form my impressions and opinions. But I did. Never wanted to be somebody like Diddy or Big Papa or any of the rappers that I was listening to at the time in the late 80s, early 90s. Because their life sounded extremely complicated. When I say complicated, I mean, granted the streets at that time were caught up in the drug trade, you know, and it could get you killed. And I didn't understand that. Did I want to be the big man on the block that everybody wanted to knock off? Cause that's what it, that's what it's like being number one. When you're number one, you don't have many friends, and almost everyone is an enemy. It's great that you got there, but boy, people in the shadows can't wait to see you fall and fall hard. The bigger the fall, oh my goodness, the more you'll get talked about and people will lose their respect and all this and they can, you know, everyone becomes an armchair psychologist as to why it's happening and so on and so forth.

Being number one, being the best, is that really what you strive to do? To be above everyone else? I think that is what I call “The Deception”. We are deceived into thinking that unless you are the best. You are lesser than, and that's not true. Our minds will tell us we're not like so and so. We're not as pretty or handsome as that person. We don't have long legs and a thin physique like she does. We're not jacked and cut like he is. Wow, look at those two. They look like they just walked out of a magazine. He's, uh, and she's stunning. And yeah, I can see why they like each other. Do you realize that when you're seeing somebody out there like that, it's a deception. A lot of social media, what you see on Instagram and Tik TOK and Facebook and Snapchat, it's, I mean people only show you the good stuff. They don't show you the work, the sweat, the pain, the loneliness. I mean, you follow somebody on social media, when was the last time they posted about, “I'm having a challenging day. I really don't like myself right now.”, “I really wish I had a real friend.”. It's very unusual.

I mean, I try to be as transparent as possible, but Jesus, I'm not going to tell you everything about me. No one knows everything about anyone else unless they're tight. And there's a lot of trust, but left to our own devices, man I'm telling you, the deception is a real!! Why do you think there are so many different women's magazines and so many women have different opinions about what beautiful is, what capable is, what confidence looks like?

Why do you think that at the beginning of an awards ceremony, the focus is on how everybody looks on the red carpet? Designer dresses and lots of bling? Not the real world, right? Not the world we live in. If you ride public transit, you see the real world we live in. And you'll never see any famous people. Stars, ex-stars, or whatnot. Never. You'll never see them on a train or a bus. You might see them on a plane, but they'll be in first class. They won't be sitting back with the great unclean like you and I. No, no, no. And what does that tell you? How different is their life compared to yours?

The deception is that they've had a charmed life, or they had this or that opportunity, which made them famous. Which to a certain extent is true, but I'm here to tell you there's a lot that goes into getting that opportunity to be shown to a large amount of people that was my experience I chased it for a long, long time telling myself what I was told since I was a kid, “You're really good!! You're going to be famous!!”, I believed it. I really didn't focus on the competition, I didn't like competition because it turned perfectly good friends and enemies, sort of. I didn't like that. And in music, you're always talked about. Always. And I was in those circles not being talked about. Bands I had weren't really the topic of conversation back in the old days, right before grunge exploded. And you know what, the deception in my head was, “I'm gonna be just like them!”. I'm gonna be just like all the cats in Mother Love Bone that I hung out with, or the Soundgarden cats that I hung out with, or the Alice in Chains cats that I hung out with. You know, we see each other two or three times a week, and it's like, “Yo, what's up, how you doing? What's up, dude?”, but after their opportunities came, gone. And now it's very interesting. It's very interesting. Would I really like to be Sean Diddy Combs? Right now, No. You? No.

The deception can lead you where you're not supposed to go and your life gets harder, not easier. You find yourself more alone instead of closer to a community or tribe. It's interesting that you spend a lot more time alone than you do actually out doing things and participating in your own life when you're chasing the deception. It's very, very interesting to me how we will tell ourselves almost anything instead of just being honest with ourselves.

A couple of podcasts ago, I was thinking about being mediocre, being mainstream, being in the middle and how that can't be bad, because then you're with a lot of others. I mean, if you don't believe me, next time you're somewhere like at the movies or maybe getting a burger or someplace, standing in a line somewhere, look down, how many people are wearing Nike shoes? How many people are wearing Nikes, as opposed to Adidas, or Puma, or Fila, or, name another brand? Look out in the parking lot. How many people drive a Japanese car versus a German car versus an American car? Now, I'm not judging people who have these things. I just question why they have these things.

Last December, I made a decision to buy a really nice car while I still could after my car got stolen because I've never had a nice car and now every time I get in and out of that car I'm more conscious about what that car says about me realizing that looking at myself getting in that car, the deception is apparent.

It is there I can't really do anything about it except keep my head right and look at where I came from, what I've been through, and why I purchased that car. I purchased it because after my car got stolen, because I had a Kia Soul, after my car got stolen I wanted a car that was going to be hard to steal. And the research told me other than Teslas, BMWs are hard to take. That's what I wanted. And while I had the opportunity, I thought I should get a nice car thinking that, you know what, this is probably going to be the last car I ever buy because the car I bought before, jeez, I bought it used in 2011 and it gave up the ghost last summer or last spring. That's pretty good. Because I'm looking at the fundamentals here. I'm looking at the fundamentals of why we try to look the way we look, say the things that we say, buy the things that we buy, in order to appear a certain way for somebody else. The deception.

How real are you? You really, really like seven, eight pairs of Nike tennis shoes that you own? Sneaker heads, I don't hate you, I just don't get you. I mean, I get it. You know, everybody has something that they like, I mean, some people collect stamps. Some others collect tennis shoes. Nothing wrong with it, until you start judging other people based on the difference between what you have versus what they have, and that's the key.

New experience, and lastly, where I live, I look out my window and I see the street that I live on, and in the past, five days, maybe six, a motorhome is parked on the side of the road. And it's a motorhome, old, kinda dilapidated, beat up. It resembles many of the motorhomes that I've seen parked on the streets in and around the city off the beaten track because people don't have a place to live. Now, immediately, the first time I noticed that it was, oh, now day three and this thing hasn't moved and I haven't seen anybody. So now I'm double checking the lock on my door, wondering when someone's going to come and take some of my ‘ish’. One of my neighbors downstairs had a package delivered, and her porch light is on, which, in old school terms means, I'm not home. So I grabbed her packages and took them inside, you know, and I'll wait until I see her car and then I'll knock on the door and give them back because I don't want them to all of a sudden disappear. The question for me is, am I jumping to conclusions? Am I stereotyping people because they have a different circumstance than I do? Is that a deception in my brain? Am I judging someone inappropriately? I don't know. I don't know. Which is why this week's podcast is on that thing that we don't know.

We don't know other people. We don't know, based on appearances, what they're like, how they think, what they have versus what you have, it's all a ruse. Things aren't people, people ‘have’ things, and people who like things more than they like people, I would be very wary of. There are people who are homeless who don't steal, don't drink, don't do dope, they're just caught in a circumstance that either they've grown accustomed to, don't like, or can't get out of. But if you don't know them, if you don't talk to them, how the hell do you know? You're guilty of your own deception. Now, being somebody who likes to practice what he preaches, I don't know whether I'm gonna talk to them or not. I don't know if I'm gonna wait to see them and approach them. I don't know. I don't know. I'll have to wait and see. Because, usually, in this world, more will be revealed. If you're paying attention, the opportunity to find out an answer, maybe not ‘the’ answer, but ‘an’ answer, that comes from outside of your head might present itself and, that's what I'm gonna do.

I think I'm gonna get back to what happens in the course of my life when I'm not doing WANZOLOGY. And that, in and of itself, is a challenge. It's like trying to find the end of spaghetti in a bowl, right? After you cook spaghetti and you pour it in a bowl, where's the end? Looking for a needle in a haystack of needles? Sometimes life is like that. Don't get discouraged. Be happy, be grateful, because whenever you notice you are somewhere, there's someone who's not there, and won't be. You woke up this morning, somebody else didn’t, and people are dying all the time. I just hope it's not you, or me.

All right, cool. Go on out there and give it the old college try even if you didn't go to college, just keep trying because you cannot succeed or fail until after you try. And that's a whole nother podcast in and of itself.

Love y'all. Take care of yourselves. I will see you next week. I'm The Wanz and I'm outta he-yah!!!!