[1260] Crowning Achievements

"Comparison is the thief of joy."

I consider myself a "high-achieving" person. What does that mean?

I have to lead with all the questions, or perhaps assumptions, that follow this kind of claim.

"So, what? You think you're better than everyone else?"

"You think you've achieved something, but what about (fill in amazing person/thing)."

"Oh, another person seeking attention and validation."

"That doesn't sound like much/enough/worthwhile to me."

"So then why can't you fix (fill in thing they know about your life.)"

"Me too! Wanna be autism/ADHD buddies!"

While it might be unwise to make unfair comparisons, it's a different exercise entirely to contextualize something. There's classics like measuring your education. Just by getting a degree, I'm in the "top 38%" of the U.S. population. Whether or not that means something you, or me, or anyone who might hire me, is a world of different questions. My degree didn’t matter for a decade, or anything to me at the time, and then it mattered a lot for things I never saw coming.

I like to use choice examples from my history to "argue" and "attest" to what I think is most indicative of the claim. I think they represent me in the "best" light, and what I'd want anyone to know about what I'm capable of. I have many classics.

In 2nd grade my teacher had a system of filling out these worksheet transparencies for $1, and paid out for every time you could recite a growing number of U.S. capitals. I bled her dry.

In 4th grade we had timed math quizzes where I routinely got done the fastest and was only remotely occasionally beaten by a kid named Jonathan.

In 5th grade I got rich on in-class currency and ran out of things to buy, so started distributing my surplus to the rest of the class, not knowing we were having one final end-of-year multi-room market day. I also completed the day’s homework before the first day’s bell if my teacher made the mistake of listing what we were going to do on the board. Me, Natasha, and Amy had an “extra” class.

In 6th grade, I read every book on the library reading list and passed every computer test, and when the assistant librarian protested against me moving on to reading the 7th grade books, the head librarian told her to kick rocks. Her "fuck you" face turned me off from bothering.

In middle and high school I was in honors classes. I was first chair in band (though, not section leader for marching band, because my band teacher is the same kind of smart-ass I am). Our jazz band won state. I graduated "early" (because we switched to trimesters my senior year, but I only had 5 of 6 classes so I got to come to school late, spend 3 of those classes in band (doing whatever I wanted for 2).

I worked 3 jobs simultaneously in high school if you understand the slave labor that is marching band. One, cart-boy-who-could-push-Target red cards so well I couldn't cash in all the food and CD vouchers I earned messing up your credit. I was promoted twice to management at my first job. I could clean theaters and close the concession stand quicker than anyone the entire 2 years and 8 months I worked there.

Are you noticing a pattern? I'm not talking about friendships, helping anyone, being a "good person," or anything I'm sure most people were better at while I was "doing me."

In college, I got disillusioned because I couldn't take classes where I had read every book on the syllabus and showed I had pockets of more knowledge about things than a T.A.

I threw parties like you see in the movies, designing a house layout for multiple kinds of entertainment and debauchery. I "won" a shot club party I'm still a little confused how I survived the next day. The average number of sexual partners is between 6-11 in a lifetime for men, so I'm 3-5 times sluttier, and don't plan to die soon.

I play 2 instruments well, 7 passably. I'm competent enough to utilize tools in a way that's allowed me to tear down sheds and turn them into rooms to my house. I've started several, technically broken-even, businesses, a non-profit, and otherwise worked 25 different jobs ranging from delivery boy to child welfare assessor. I've gotten certified in forensic interviewing, my real estate broker's license, and to cab drive. I've written at least 1,260 times trying to better understand myself and where/whether I belong.

I've seen 1,815 days worth of television and movies (sped up, no commercials) of 2,190 shows and 4,116 movies. I've seen 1,147 comedy/music/theater performances during 467 concerts/shows, with 882 artists at 137 venues in 41 locations. I own land, my house, 2 working vehicles. The furthest I’ve been west is California, north Montreal, south Florida, and east North Carolina.

I think many people would think about what they have or haven't achieved in terms of their family. I've functionally cut most of mine off. My longest relationship was for 5 years, and I think it's true that we probably spent the back half of it breaking up. I've never seriously wanted kids. Until my mid 20s, I had very little, if no regard, for how I spoke or carried myself in how it made you feel.

My mom was physically and emotionally abusive. My dad's the nicest person I know, and my grandma held the title before him before she died. He's also an iron-worker, Harley rider, and grew up with a WWII veteran household where both my grandparents worked in the steel mill. A certain work ethic and expectation has been instilled. My grandpa spoke 4 languages and killed Nazis. I barely understand some Spanish and really hope I’m contributing to the world in a way that prevents us from having to kill Nazis again.

I had no control over being born "cute" or "smart" or "talented" or into a free post world war country my grandparents immigrated to. I can't reasonably lay claim to those things. I certainly haven't even spent most of my life passably "wise" or "nice." I could follow certain rules and procedures to what were, in the past, more predictable ends. The abuse from my mother had me pretty-well trained not to play with certain kinds of fire. I graduated around the financial crash, within the neoliberal march towards "globalization," and concentrations of wealth more extreme than has ever existed. I grew up alongside the internet, long enough to remember before it was thing, when it used to be cool, and can now mourn for what it's become.

What "I" could or can achieve on any given day of my life is extremely context specific. Are girls fucking me if I'm not 22 and we're both at least tipsy? Thankfully, yes, but who's going to pretend that wasn't an extremely specific set of conditions that juiced the numbers? Do I graduate college if my dad didn't get settlement money and it was paid for before it began? I went from honor student to learning how to party I felt so betrayed by college, not because I was sheltered or couldn't hack it; it showed me why it was beneath me and how it was a waste of time and money.

I got into social work at 30. The wanna-be entrepreneur who found himself out of a home due to deteriorating communication and relationships with past friends was proving bleak. I started getting put in charge of transporting people's children to supervised visitations and recording/reporting how those visits went. I transferred to the State, where now I was tasked with investigating physical and sexual abuse allegations. What I said had to make sense in court. I had to invite myself into your home in a way that would keep you liking and talking to me. I never found the work itself stressful.

Now, I'm a CADAC II addiction counselor who has been told on more than one occasion I'm better than previous therapists my clients have talked to. I'm not a therapist. I've shadowed other counselor's sessions. I'm inclined to believe them, if only because my approach I feel has little to do with "me." I listen and re-frame. You either do the work or not. I'm not engaged or entertained by trying to judge you or pit our experiences against each other. If what I'm talking about doesn't make sense to you in your terms and within the context of your life, I might as well be speaking bad Spanish.

I suspect, if you've made it this far, at some point you got exasperated or annoyed with the examples I presented from my life in service to my claim. "Who cares?" "What does this have to do with anything?" "This isn't why I internet." That fundamental self-bias is the thing our institutions and traditions, often woefully, invite us to transcend. Give it up to God, right? "We're a family!" your creepy corporate overlord beckons. If you've dropped acid or done shrooms and viscerally experienced the oneness of everything, you might stay psychologically and dispositionally open to investigating just how this, and in fact anything, reflects some aspect of "you."

I think I'm moved to make something of an accounting of my sense of achievement because it feels like I'm on the verge of matching or beating where I've set the bar. I work for a company, and an individual, who I think has real promise of being a long-term business partner who I'm investing my time and resources with at functionally the ground floor. I'm paid an hourly rate that makes the all-encompassing nature of social work worth it. In weeks, not months, I'll be able to materially alter how I spend my time and what I'm able to invest in.

My problem is being perfectly convinced about what I'm capable of or willing to do. That's not a secret to me or anyone around me. My problem is how to get more people on board. I romanticize the college party days precisely because it was something that felt like "us" more than "me." For as many times as people have told me to go fuck myself (they phrase it as, "good luck"), naked tequila parties are a different animal if you're by yourself.

I think we're suffering an immense political crisis. I see up close every day how and why your "average person" cannot exercise the tools or mechanisms of their contexts. Their mental and physical health is poor. The jobs available barely pay. The "basic" life expenses can't be covered. The people who represent them, don't. I spend most of my days trying to speak to the nature of the context they are embedded in so they don't eat themselves alive with the story of what they aren't worth or can't achieve. Consistently waking up on time, getting to work, catching yourself before you say a mean or harmful thing, and allowing yourself to feel good, ever, are real meaningful achievable and worthwhile goals any day you choose to adopt them.

Today, I think it's less mysterious why I lasted as long as I did at DCS or why I continue to take jobs where I'm patiently and actively trying to quell the raging consequences of abuse and negligence that have manifested through my clients' behaviors. I don't know what we can achieve together or what you will go on to do once we sort out the "easy" things I got to take for granted as I flexed the edges of my context. I'm infinitely curious about how good things can be when we all find the right form of peace and prosperity that prompts us to achieve as highly as we can.

There's an order of operations. There's rules. There's a plane of mutual understanding we must all occupy to get there. I'd prefer, most often, we didn't have to be high and drunk to share it. I'd prefer it didn't pop up as lashing out in hatred or exhaustion for the wrong things. I think the more time we spend figuring out how much "I" am shaped by what we're paying attention to, the better chance we have to take responsibility for how we're spending that time and attention.

In the next 6 months, "I" want to have a robustly operational civic-mirror.com because I think I'll have the money to both buy the infrastructure to operate it, and afford the expertise to do it right. I want to have most of the tickets bought for the 100 shows a year average I'm trying to keep for the 5th year. I want to have my fence project completed. I want to be working a "comfortable" 40-50 hour a week schedule 4 days a week in what I hope is a growing partnership. I'd "like" to spend an obscene amount of money eating at Smyth in Chicago, and to seriously consider music/recording lessons.

I like the idea of centralizing what it means to achieve in terms of what you build or create. That doesn't pit "stuff" against a family or skill set. What took a meaningful sacrifice of time to get good at? What aren't you willing to trade for what you know or how you operate now? Are the examples of who you are or what you're worth part of a self-serving narrative, or demonstrative of your values and ongoing work? I want to make money so I can invest and distribute. I want to build accountability tools so I can see the things I want and need manifest within my lifetime and in service to the people I care about. I want to grow in my talent and capacity so I can connect with people who I admire for the work they've done in service to theirs. I want you to feel as capable of solving and organizing your universe as I do mine so we can see what they do combined.

[1259] Swing Low

I’m feeling something of a “chaos energy,” so let’s see if it translates to anything worth reading.

I’m running for office. I did it, literally almost last filing minute, after catching a post from MAD Indiana Voters showing a list of offices running unopposed. It’s a forgone conclusion in most people’s minds that Indiana is a republican/fascist stronghold, right? Pay no mind to Obama winning the state in 2008, that’s ancient history, and we all know politics is about the immediacy of our ever-escalating grievances.

As soon as I filed, my filing was challenged by a local crazy person. A very annoying several hours attending a public hearing I, and dozens of others she had challenged, resulted in time wasted I won’t get back and the immediate reality check for why “people” don’t get involved or “nothing” gets done. These processes and procedures are by design. They slow things down. They make things bureaucratic so they, theoretically, don’t get violent. That morning, adults performed an accountability ritual, respect, and patience towards someone incapable of grasping the concepts for themselves.

Then I attended my first democratic party meeting. I was 1 of 4 people there under the age of 40. I listened to no less than 15 polite asks for money, for shirts, for banners, for flyers, for some quasi-beleaguered group, for someone’s individual effort that’s really set to do something swell. See you at the booth, the cookout, the farmer’s market weeks from now. I was invited to facebook groups, group chats, and email chains. I’ve been told I should be introduced to so and so. They want to support me in any way they can.

My pithy and aggravated way to summarize my experience so far is, it’s like the Nazis are up the road, shooting people, burning down everything I care about, and my compatriots are huddled against a window looking out at the destruction, and the first thing anyone thinks to say is, “We should call a meeting about this.”

There is no leader. There is no faith in the broader structure or coalition. You have a handful of the busy-types trying to project agreeability as they throw ideas into the wind of what “anyone” should do. It’s people spinning wheels. It’s people convinced of their own side-quest. It’s people who make you feel exhausted about the meta-work of how to sort and organize them on top of the real battle at your door.

Cue the stick-in-your-own-bike-spokes commentary. “They’re just trying to make a difference!” “Winning would be great!” “Our chances are small, but if we try in every race our chances improve!” “At this point, I’m happy with any improvement!” These are all real quotes.

I’m a counselor. I have to take vague contradictory and often empty chaos and turn it into specific action that we can measure in order to say anything meaningful about whether or not you’re “getting better.” “Just” is a trigger word for me. “Difference,” from what to what? Why do you think our chances are small? Why do you think I think you’re going to stay perfectly unable to explain yourself? What does “trying” look like, and would Yoda have anything to say about that? What can you say is improved if you refuse to define a floor?

I remember writing about the origins and effectiveness of the ironically named “Tea Party.” Idiots ignorantly screaming lies from a bed of oligarchic money in service to inducing a broader cultural psychosis has fundamentally altered our concept of ourselves and politics. They won, hammering the stupid bell, until we all went deaf. What’s the strategy democrats? Knock doors and hand people a spreadsheet? (real suggestion). Generate 6 different websites showing precinct percentages and asking over and over and over again what problems are facing “real people” while it never fucking occurs to you to just sit and talk with them? (real example).

People are addicted to their self-serving stories, exacerbated by social media, but in general as, allegedly, conscious animals. They don’t, actually, vote “issues.” They aren’t, actually, dispositionally situated to be an educated accountable progressive hive-mind. They are situational, relational, and opportunistic. A few buck trends and occasionally find seats of decent power to set a different kind of example. The vast majority, believe it or not, will not nor ever learn or care about the extent of anything you’ve heard on any actual news outlet. They’re Kaleb on Clarkson’s Farm watching the robot planter move 2 miles an hour up and down the field for hours. They’ve never watched a TikTok to the end.

So, what’s the nature of the problem? “Stupid people?” “Voter turnout?” “Attention spans?” “Propaganda?” “Disorganization?” Your favorite excuse is as good as any.

2 out of 3 “average” people will profess a full-throated desire for something akin to a dictatorship. They want a leader. They want direction. They want to be given license to hate a designated enemy. They want life as easy as most of you provide for your pets. How much time are you spending trying to figure out how to persuade your dog to care about climate change? Tell me, honestly, what your cockatoo thinks about the deaths of children and soft power after the cuts to USAID. The fascists have taken over on the power of blind hatred, and you’re still trying to cope with the irony of them co-opting taxation without representation?

I think you’re scared to admit and work with the hate you feel. I think you want to pretend you’re better than Cletus. I think the nature of your addictive self-delusion sets its sights so low.

[1258] Typical

I think it’s every single person’s responsibility to figure out what “balance” means to them.

I don’t mean in some kind of grandiose cosmic sense either. I think people are lazy and unwise when they invoke karma or divine punishment.  If I have to wait for you to get to Hell before I experience a sense of justice or relief, I’m just avoiding the work. I don’t trust that “bad” or “evil” people get their due, nor do I see rewards reaped by those I consider the best of us. Also, don’t take my word for it, talk to them yourself.

That’s what I do. I talk. I talk to myself in writing. I talk to “you,” the disembodied impression I get of the amalgamation of internet commentary, upvotes, and propaganda masquerading as individual identity and thought. I talk to clients. I talk to friends. I talk to people I’ve once conceived of as “family” or “friend” that, for the sake of sense and mental health, are better situated as memories or acquaintances.

There’s a sign you’re talking too much, un an unbalanced way, when you’re just repeating yourself. I work in addiction. My signal to redirect you is around the 3rd or 4th time you’ve said, almost exactly, the same thing to me within the course of a few minutes. The ruminating on a problem or the matter-of-fact, almost rehearsed, restatement of where you’re coming from. When your fundamental disposition is that of betrayed trust, unreliable reality, and out-of-control reactionary behavior, you anchor on something chronic, repeatable.

I think it’s the same reason children watch the same things over and over again. There’s safety and security in what you can predict and reproduce. To the extent your drug use interrupted or broke your developmental capacity, it stands to reason you would default to a “stuck” place. I don’t think it’s a leap to imagine the same structural forces operating in any individual brain mapping onto how we conduct our broader broken cultures. If we’ve raised generations devoid of certain values, practices, or molding circumstances, I think what “we” see today makes almost too much sense.

I’m struck by how often I hear, “I could never believe” or “I would never imagine.” The latest was 30 minutes ago from Scott Pelley on an episode of The Interview. This is a man who has spent almost as much time as I’ve been alive traveling the world, embedding himself into life-threatening situations, and reporting on the vastness of human experience. If he’s capable of being shocked and surprised about the depth of human depravity, disingenuousness, and destruction, we’re talking about something that transcends knowledge and experience.

At work, people say things like they can’t believe their spouse would be so abusive or manipulating. They can’t believe the cops or the courts or the people involved in the programs they were apart of would so something so callous or negligent. They can’t believe their own behavior when they were deeper in their addiction. Outside of work, I often get laughs from people who’ve said something like, “I can’t believe you’d say that!” Yes, we’re talking about a colloquial way in which people speak, but also, I believe people genuinely aren’t imagining and reckoning with what’s possible and how often it occurs.

I believe. Mostly, it’s because it doesn’t feel like a belief system. I just see, and hear, and read about, and watch 60 Minutes, and listen to dozens of podcasts, and take in hundreds of stories of woe well-independent of whether I’m getting paid for it that day. I have to balance how often I’m steeped in “drama” altogether with how often I’m talking about TV or music. If I’m not paying attention, it’s literally just drama all the time. My friends are primarily social workers. They have messy family lives. My family is its own brand of chronic condition.

Many, maybe not most, days I feel out of balance. I, generally, have “a lot” or “too much” energy relative to the people around me or the tasks I might adopt. If we just took a snapshot of today, I got up around 10. The weather is a little hot, but I could go outside and get things done. I could play videogames. I could practice an instrument. I could get caught up on my TV shows. I could do the handful of chores. It’s only 4 o’lock. I’ve eaten, spent some time vibe-coding, and watched Tucci in Italy. Every single day there’s a “worthy-day”’s worth of activity, but it rarely “feels balanced.”

Therefore, my task most days, is to dig out what I think I “should” do, and for how long, every day. This gets easier when I obligate myself to a job and “regular” working hours. This gets easier when I’m “forced” to wake up and go to bed around the same times. If there’s any “real” obligation like picking up cat food or needing to mail something, so much of the work is done for me. I write in service to looking for the balance, the signal to “go,” or permission to structure and work within that structure.

Otherwise, it all feels like a blog of “stuff” to “maybe.” I start imagining my “perfect” kind of days, which acts as it’s own anchor because no matter what I do or accomplish, it’s not going to live up to the emotional resonance of artful dreaming. I’m working towards that perfection as often as I can. I look for jobs that don’t consume all my time. I try to budget in a way that let’s me eat what I want, go where I want to go, or live within a window of security most do not afford themselves. That is, the nature of what I’m “pressured” to do any given day isn’t typical. It’s a blessing in the flow and moments in which I’m exercising that freedom. It’s a curse when I’m floating about.

The balance between that floating and a more disciplined day is something hard to discuss because I don’t meet, really anyone, who seems to be as concerned with it as I am. They embody the obligations of their jobs or families. They don’t feel like they have choices really at all, seemingly ever. Again, don’t take my word for it, talk to them. They spend their time appeasing and pacifying or justifying the consequences they experience from others or the nature of their own complacency. “What can they do?” They ask insincerely.

You can do what you attend to. I write because on these floaty/disconcerting days where I technically have freedom, if I don’t do this kind of exercise to focus up and explore where my brain wishes to drift, I’m functionally paralyzed. I won’t do the “easy” things. I won’t find the enjoyment in things I claim to enjoy. It’s hard to do anything because I’m literally not doing the work, yet, of conceiving of myself and the consequences of my relationship to those things. Will I feel “guilty” or “lazy” if I do or don’t? Right now, do I “care?” You don’t know if you don’t ask. You don’t get useful actionable information if you can’t answer honestly.

I’m on verge of a level of productivity and engaging/meaningful work that I’ve never really had before. In the balance between time, money, and operating conditions, I’ve tended to have an overabundance of 1 or 2, and none of the 3rd. It sucks to be poor, but when you have money and time and it decides to rain for 3 weeks, that’s acutely frustrating. Well, I have a job now where I set the schedule, can make enough in a week to afford pretty much any project around the land, any ticket I wish to buy, and any targeted-ad tool I might think is useful. I’m imagining vacations. I’m budgeting things like extending my fort and experimenting with new hobbies.

I watch these travel or cooking shows where people who’ve fished the same waters and cook the same meals for decades look relaxed and happy. They have a routine. They have family. They have the joy of food and wine. They have the weather that literally bakes into a sort of eternal moment you can see they are savoring indefinitely. They’re managing to do so when the backdrop of their existence is plagued by ridiculous and destructive politics. You get a real sense that there’s a way to live, right here and now, every day, in spite of seemingly everyone and everything that can’t figure it out choosing instead to look for ways to kill you.

I wonder if that’s the begrudging default “balance” people lay claim to. The one where what they love rests on precarious assumptions. Who would suspect their love or appreciation manifests in spite more than as a cause for its own sake? Do you make the world’s most delicious risotto in lieu of finding, cultivating, recognizing, and protecting those who would preserve your ability to do so for generations? I can point to many things I deeply enjoy. I still think I would prefer a genuine sense that, or I, were safe to enjoy them. As safe as I know we all could be if our actions matched the depth of the words we used.

[1257] Working Girls

I want to tell you a little bit about my job. To me, it’s not a very complicated job, but it has as many moving parts as exist within the people involved. I think it’s odd to call it “social work,” given the people who need to do all the work are the ones I’m tasked with inviting to do so.

“Social work,” is very broad terminology wise. I used to be an assessor for DCS. I’ve done visit supervision for a few companies. I’ve done “case work” in every role, including prison. I’m a CADAC II counselor in an environment that’s so overwhelmed I get routinely called “therapist,” and have been explicitly told by many therapists I’ve worked with who have audited my classes I’m “basically a therapist.” I take this to mean both therapists and I use the same models and strategies, yet are equally helpless to do any real work for you.

I’ve been out of social work for a few months and just got a new job. It’s like riding a bike. It’s a source of perpetual fascination to me that “the problem,” while manifesting in individual ways, is exactly the same whether you’re in prison, in-patient, IOP, or the infinitely grey sea between IOP and OP, or in just maintaining sobriety. It doesn’t matter the drug. It doesn’t matter if you have “too many” rules or “too much” freedom. I’m never without what needs to be done in my approach to the infinite list of what’s presented to me.

At bottom, what most people are suffering in any given moment is a lie.

The suffering is real. Don’t deliberately, or otherwise, mishear me, as is so routine throughout my day. The suffering is anxiety and depression, a series of traumas in the not-so-distant past, medical conditions due to use, aging, or violence. All those things hurt, truly.

The lie looks something like an excuse. The lie operates like a tool that removes the obligation of slowing down or examining your role. The lie looks like the reflection in a funhouse mirror. Technically, if you’re standing in front of it, that is, in fact, you reflected back. The story of refraction, perception, and complicated subjective experience is something of an infinitely long digression approximately 1 in 10 people are interested in exploring long enough to get it.

If you zoom out and take a broad picture of “addiction,” you start the see the pathologies in your clients manifested in your colleagues. Whatever you wish to make of their protective factors, it becomes blindingly obvious that there’s an irresolvable blurriness between “good” and “bad” habits. You can absolutely find yourself compulsively working, eating, “helping” by diving into the infinite flow of drama, peacocking, or blaming your behavior on your ADHD.

If you’re good at boundaries, this leaves you practically hoping to meaningfully contribute to an environment so that it’s less self-destructive, but you might be the most significant observer of what’s already an extremely thin line. Moreover, those, in good faith, that you work with, might not even realize or be that keen to learn about how they’re threatening the whole endeavor.

I think stupid political actors operate the same way. I, who listens to hundreds of hours of political commentary and pays some attention to global affairs, occupies a different semantic universe than someone who can’t tell you who the acting attorney general is. Any subject takes the time, attention, and basic interest in order to be learned. When you learn it deeply enough, you can start to see deeper implications and patterns. If you “don’t care,” you get to ride the lie that your acts, or lack thereof, are of no consequence or significantly less consequence than they actually are.

Frustratingly, unfortunately, ridiculously, because the god you claim to believe in is hysterical, you matter. I can’t fucking stand it. Because in my world, my brain, it means I have to work hard, pay attention, tell the truth, and figure out even basically what the fuck I’m doing with myself any given day. I don’t really get a choice unless I want to suffer like someone addicted to a bad, incorrect, and woefully incomplete story.

I have to traverse the universe of differences between myself who has intimately mapped the degrees to which he matters for decades, and a population who has practiced implicitly and explicitly the idea that they do not matter. And they’ve likely practiced even more aggressively than me to establish their instincts and habits. I think the world of silent complicit “moderates,” suffers the same condition.

I don’t bring my job home with me often. I can respond to a crisis or hit a snag with paperwork, but the souls I’m wrestling with don’t haunt me. I’m very clear about what I want, what it takes, and what I’ll contribute to help. I don’t want anything for you you don’t want for yourself. I will never pretend otherwise when I’m there, and what you’re doing in sober living, it’s work, all the time. We’re not hanging out. We’re not best friends. I’m not your boss or keeper. I’m your opportunity to slow down and your reminder that the work can be done in spite of how you feel.

I’ll help fill out forms. I’ll provide rides. I’ll re-frame the most damming things you’ve shocked yourself by admitting for the first time. I’ll let you cry. I’ll stand in perfect detached non-judgment as we walk down whatever path we must or can. I can’t make you want to live. I can’t make you honest. I can’t make you “believe” in the consequences of your actions and how they make you, or us, suffer. I can’t tie words to emotional meaning if you are unable or unwilling. It’s not my job to save you, trap you, or merely occupy your time with jargon and obligations in a bid to avoid dealing with what I need to work on.

So it goes in the “normal” or “non-addicted” landscape. Do you think we get fascism if most people aren’t just lying, but doing so in such a catastrophic and compulsive way that we’re functionally suicidal? I don’t care what flavor or era of fascism you look at, at bottom, it’s lies. Lies about purity and purpose. Lies about “them.” Lies about capacity and consequences. We know, intellectually, the fire raging that we set. Emotionally, we’re dead. There’s no real and meaningful response to the chaos we’ve sowed. So we take another hit, point the finger, and undermine what little those with the awareness and capacity might yet be able to save.

What I’m describing often manifests in complacency and complicity in the people I work with who might be better at it than average. They use the statistics as license to phone it in or drag quick things out over weeks or months because it keeps the paycheck coming. They tell a story of what they would build or do differently, but they want the same things our clients do. They want the easy win. The functional disability check. They want to bill the state regardless of whether they actually believe they’ve done all they can for someone. Why? They have more official, more standard and socially acceptable lies to maintain.

I’d bet and win every time that you’re so tired and never have enough time. I know that you don’t think I’d ever believe the drama from your so and so! These gas prices, these groceries, and these no good dirty politicians basically fucked your spouse and killed your dog! You're just thinking of the children! You’re the hero. You’re entitled to exacting your revenge with every fired shot across a comment section bow. You know, the realpolitik of purity tests, ironic dismissal, and increasingly AI-generated astro-turfing.

I used to suffer the lie that I could save the world. I was poised to do it by speaking intelligently, getting attention, and leading a charge. Little did I know. I can save my world, not yours. I can write this blog, not your entry. I can eat my food, watch my shows, play my games and instruments, rock out with my friends, blast my music, drive my car, build my house on my land, and choose the shape my suffering takes. And I can know that I want it that way compared to the alternatives. And I can save and protect and advocate for the ways to get there because I know they exist independent of me, but also die with me, if you’re not practicing the same things.

I find this incredibly empowering, humbling, and energizing. I find this pretty easy to understand because I’ve reached a point in life where the work I do I take for granted. I’ve done more than “try.” I’ve embodied the consequences like a muscle stuck throbbing after an intense workout. It wasn’t an accident. No one granted a wish. I didn’t magically come upon a secret. I worked, and continue to work, one line at a time, one day at a time, one choice to meet my needs, demonstrate my world of values and desires, in any given moment.

I wasn’t able to shut up when I didn’t understand that silence was a choice. I’m never able to empathize with those who seemingly choose to stay silent about the fire daring to engulf us. I couldn’t hear until I recognized the choice to listen. I couldn’t be honest until I recognized the choice to be responsible for maintaining the integrity of words and a shared reality. And now I can’t go back even if I wanted to. For me to want to, I’d have to behave as insistently self-destructively as I observe addicted and non-addicted alike.

So, what’s my job? Is it anything like yours? Are you truly living in service to a world that you actually want to live in? I’m invigorated by Scott Pelley and Stephen Colbert getting fired. They aren’t dead. They’re more alive than their their audiences can recognize. They’re burning hotter than the fascist forces clear-cutting the forest of once trusted institutions. If you’re paying the requisite attention you’ll connect their work to what yours must consist of. You’ll feel it like they feel it. You’ll practice as you preach.

Or, you won’t. I get paid either way.

[1256] Sample Size

Of the 30-ish small, part, or full-time jobs I’ve had in 23 years, handing out food samples isn’t one I thought I’d be writing about in a dedicated way. The first instinct is always to contextualize and list my previous jobs or accomplishments. There’s a “shame,” in a sense, that I would find myself, ever, doing something like standing in place for 6 hours, parsing chips, jerky, or cold brew coffee into little cups.

It’s all self-imposed. I know how to reframe on a dime. After all, I’m doing the noblest thing my sick and pathetic country pretends to respect. Working! I dressed the part, showed up on time, followed instructions, and await my $240 for 2 6-hour days doing something that also allowed me to power through a giant podcast backlog simultaneously. My coworkers were nice, customers inspiring in a way I will digress on shortly, and in comparison to the thousands of rocks I shoveled with my dad on a grave he was hired to maintain, I’ve certainly put myself through considerably more work for $100 recently. (He also took me out for a baller lunch steak, so, you know, my dad’s cooler than yours.)

My ADHD self is not equipped to stand/sit still. The first 2 times I’ve signed up to hand out samples, I didn’t have the podcasts in my ear. I got by chatting with coworkers, dancing out, play-boxing with the food around me, and finding “creative” ways to wipe down and clean the cart. As the bounds of my sanity get tested, I move towards crowd-work. Often, I get a smile or laugh. Awkwardly, I get zero acknowledgement at all. But there’s this sensitivity and fragility that presents itself in the moment sometimes.

Sam’s Club is like a family spot. There’s so many kids I don’t think I would have otherwise noticed except for their very different posture in the approach and/or ability to grab a sample. Then there’s the parents who almost insist their child take in whatever clearly unhealthy thing I’m pushing. I appreciate the ones who have internalized early that stopping and waiting and asking for permission. It’s nice to see. I seriously wonder about the parents who hand their child something they clearly have no capacity to even hold.

Then there’s the “let me touch every piece of food reaching for one cup in particular” type. These people are under the impression that food taken from a package at the same time as other food is actually fresher in the back. Invariably, they will have extremely dirty, like cartoonishly gross fingernails and/or open sores on their hands really emphasizing how much you can’t just let it go what they’ve touched along the way.

Mostly, though, it’s the weird oscillation between people insisting they say “hi” or nodding as they walk by, and those who don’t register you’re standing there at all. You’re in the flow of a thousand people’s weekend errands. Your status as the bringer of potentially tasty free noms is explicitly indicated well before they actually arrive at your booth. Your existence as a person altogether equally indicated.

It’s the definition of a job that could/should be taken over by a machine. The gig doesn’t even work for Sam’s. The handful of people asking me where things are in the store, and I’m like…I don’t even work for the company on my hat, technically. I remember as a kid being wildly excited about Sam’s Club samples. You can feel the institutional knowledge that has kept it a sizeable franchise for so long. You bet your ass my lunch every day I worked there was between $2 and $5 to get full from their cafeteria.

My supervisor really liked me. She was so thankful they didn’t have to really train or babysit me. She liked that I was polite and on time. She was relieved that I could read the instructions, operate a 3-bin sink, and innovatively served iced coffee, get this, on ice, layering the cups.

Because I’m back to normal broke, 3 shifts, 6 hours a day, 45 minutes away, technically, pays my monthly bills. It’s why I may continue to do it as a side job. I still don’t have running water, which is probably around $2,000 to get fixed unless I discover a magically cheap way to safely pull and repair my own well. I owe my dad about that much as well. I’d like to throw a few grand to a couple friends for work on my car and support in my business endeavors. The bear-minimum isn’t going to cut it.

Incidentally, I think I just got hired onto a new counseling job at 35/hr, independently contracted, in which the executive director already sent me the forms to fill out for direct deposit and logging into their billing system. If it’s not a raging dumpster fire, I could potentially make all the money I just talked about needing in a month of full-time. Full-time counseling, maybe casework, or maybe crafting the team she discussed wanting to build to help scale what sounds like a massive influx of cash they just got. I could work somewhat remotely. I can craft my own lesson plans and hours. It sounds like an improvement on the model of a similarly sized company I had to quit when they just kept hacking away at my paycheck and killing everything I built.

I talked with the executive director for an hour, and she both emailed and called me within a day or 2 of me filling out the application. This was already a good sign. I’ve had to beat on doors, proverbially, for weeks/months to get hired on at places allegedly desperate to hire. I’ve spent a week “on-boarding” because they couldn’t be bothered to send a pre-populated email with digital forms. The basics appear to be in place here already, and those in social work long enough know when like recognizes like when you’re talking expectation setting and drama navigating, so clicking on that level quickly did not register as superficial and going-through-motion-y.

I’m not ashamed to do gigs. I’m ashamed of the country I live in where someone as educated, motivated, and capable as me is often finding himself wholly adrift, feeling behind, and lost in ambivalent woods. I know what that means for people less capable than me. I know what that means for those who don’t have a dad who will offer a spot to help him with his extra income job, then feed them robustly without hesitation.

I knew, somewhere, sometime, a job like this one was incoming. My temporarily embarrassed, slightly impoverished or inconvenienced state is, in the righteous telling, a choice about what I won’t do for money. It’s significantly moreso a choice than it is a story of my irresponsibility, disregard, or laziness. I’ve had plenty high-enough-ish paying jobs to keep pulling in funds if I was willing to explicitly destroy what I value about myself or how I learned to care about other people.

Knowing it’s a choice to gig, and knowing how I get there, is an important step-by-step story of agency and the salience of consequences. If I don’t feel like I’m “doing the right thing,” I get very, dangerously, angry. I get self-destructive. Manipulation tips from “tempting” to “practical.” I don’t ultimately really want to be here or alive if I push the conclusions all the way through. I’m erasing myself. I’m lying. I’m so inconsistent so as not to be able to recognize myself. That’s a terrifying and dark place to be.

My “energy” or “awareness” is born of a certain through-line you might identify through everything I write, job I work, and goal I set. I don’t get to just pop in and out of being like the littlest particle. I need to exist somewhere in the noise the whole time, or I seek annihilation. I may not have the whole picture of the many levels on which I can exist, but I can certainly recognize when I’m under attack. Better stated, I’m always under attack, and I can tell when fighting the wrong fight is destined to lose.

This is why I maintain my sense of self relative to time, my relationships, and my interests more than my job or money. This is why I turn inward and contemplative when I recognize I can talk to a dozen people that day, and none of them will be capable of hitting that “real” place without seriously destabilizing their mental health or self-conception. They didn’t come that day to discuss the precarity of gig work, and I’m not offering them the revolution.

It’s “normal” to come to a giant warehouse and pick up a box of crackers that will feed you for months. It’s normal to be tickled pink by the silly joke over the flavor of the latest Dorito. I’ve been in Terre Haute. I’ve seen More U.S.A. and gun t-shirts and hats than anyone should ever have to. It’s normal for these folks to think nothing of what the government they voted for is doing in the background to kill hundreds of thousands overseas as they walk their 75“ TV out on a pallet cart. You could be accused of being in your sober and sound mind just carrying on like it’s a normal Sunday after church milling about the food library in your nicer clothes.

The control that capital has to put us under a spell is amazing. I’m not in that store unless I need money. Many overheard conversations are about the money saved by buying in bulk. It’s a wonder if those who hesitate and question whether they can really take the free sample, are they so caked in capital dynamics, they feel wrong or scared if it doesn’t cost something? Somewhere inside, they just can’t believe it!

And they’re right. You gotta be a member. You might be denied by the flimsy authority bestowed upon me by my hat and apron. What a curious thing it is to witness a dozen people eyeball the treasure on the tray as they slowly creep on by. Then, as if by licensing hoard, to swarm behind an emboldened sampler who heard about how these Doritos are healthy and they’ve been meaning to try them! I sold something like 40 bags, if you think millions spent on bliss points of flavor don’t sell themselves. Audible expressions of joy and the sentiments about the deliciousness did abound.

Simple food for simple folk. Simple consumer role to occupy. Simple jobs. Simple asks. Bound up in infinitely complex power and need dynamics, but if you value new chips, it does a lot of the heavy lifting and cuts through the noise.

[1255] Default

I’m not even a little tired. Had I any focus, I’d do something “productive,” like grade terrible papers or build something out of wood. I want, more than anything, to return to vibe-coding in the endless, almost compulsive, way that generated enough of a site to show people and set up some meetings. The reason I want to keep working on it goes so far beyond the site though. I caught my old spark. The person I think I am and the otherwise mess of my brain was, very slowly yet quasi magically snapping into focus one tortured exchange with an A.I. tool at a time.

I say it a lot because it’s vital to understanding anything about me, but I don’t fit. People instinctively think there’s something “off” or “up” with me. I put them on guard. They play it off, but body language isn’t hard to discern. When I was a kid, I described it as, “You’re either on ‘the level,’ or not.” I glorified a kind of observational or detached space. I thought thoughts and feelings weren’t intertwined. That framing made less and less sense the further away I got from traumatizing forces in my life. The closer I paid attention to what was racing through my brain or gut helped too.

Lately, the disconnect looks like dozens of innocuous conversation hiccups. I went garage-saling with my friend and her family. Her parents are the kind of ho-hum fascists that have lazy faux-news talking points to support their views, and simultaneously are typical caring normal suburban aging white people. As basic as it gets. They have 2 daughters, my friend and her older sister. We’re in the backseat and ADHD older sister is pinging between each thing exciting her, and she mentions data centers.

Part of my project is trying to take complex issues like data centers and personalize them for individual actions in individual areas. This means I’ve learned a lot about them. I shared a sliver. The car took a familiar pause as I walked us into a familiar chapter of my life. I share something about a real issue happening right now where they live, that will not just coast them money, but threaten things they care about from schools to the environment. But that’s a “real” conversation. That’s details. That’s work. She was just throwing “data centers” out here with the same passing enthusiasm as she did the Banana Ball mascot being a pitcher.

I’m not angry at her. I’m not blaming. I don’t feel “above” or “smart.” I feel alone. I feel like unless I’m drinking, I’m physically incapable of finding whatever “normal” page most people are talking on most of the time. And if I point it out or press the issue, another predictable set of outcomes to choose from. Now, I’m either manipulative, cold, or a target.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the difference between what I think and feel. I’ve spent much time differentiating “need” from “want.” I legitimately try to speak as closely as I can to what feels and sounds like the truth, as I feel it, or don’t, or can explain and discern at the time. My friend wants to do something about her bedroom trim. I can’t begin to concern myself about the concept of trim, and am waiting for her to decide if I’m going to help her install new trim or rehab her old trim. This thought can plague her for weeks. I add it to the thousand examples of how neither I, nor anyone I know, seems to have real problems.

But, of course, we do. We live in a horrible state that does everything in its power to kill people and bleed them dry. Health is always a concern on some level, even if mine has been generally good most of my life. There’s always a bill coming due. My friend’s wife getting hit by a car and taking 2 years to get back to like 80% definitely constitutes a real problem. I’m thankful to only be in debt to family any more. More than needing a reliable higher-paying job, I need somewhere I fit.

I fit with me, and in and amongst my stuff and desires. When I have the money, I buy the things I want. I go where I want to go. I eat what I want to eat. I watch my shows, create at random, and work on my dozens of projects around the land. I fit when I’m hanging with friends or my dad, but I still need to stay somewhat alert to the ways in which my nature can violently crash into normal sensibilities. At work, I fit at the top, removed from the discomfort I conjure in people who tell me things to do without the same sense of genuine authority they feel from me.

You might read this wrong and think I want to be in charge or in control. I insist, I just want to fit. I want to show what happens when you move step by step and organize. I want to manifest the truth of words used correctly. I want the space I’ve created for myself in order to get oriented or practiced and specific to work its way deep into you as well.

I think part of the reason I find myself here is because of the work I’ve done. I don’t want to needlessly suffer. I don’t want to have a headache because I’m so confused or my being is so contradicted I can’t think or see straight. That’s why I started writing. That’s why I spent years exploring the conversations and fights around the nature of existence. That’s why I try and fail as often as I can find opportunities to. The alternative is unbearable. I have a choice, but if it’s suffering either way, it needs to mean something.

I respect the power and purpose of self-destruction. I learned how to drink. I text and drive. I stay up way past my bed time and eat like my grandpa never had heart problems. I take the realization that we don’t get out alive to choose the little ways I want to die. I want to die at concerts. I want to die with a burger in my mouth. I want to die halfway through the coolest things I could ever think to create or work on. I want to die with even the vaguest memory of as much art and story-telling as I can fit into my brain.

I think in normal people terms, it comes out as “I don’t want to die.” There’s a fundamental denial and fear driving a familiar narrative around saviors. There’s an array of gods to worship depending on which propaganda pipe organ is blaring the loudest that day. Are people living, or running? Are they “having the conversation,” or orchestrating generation after generation with a wholesale inability to even conceive of “the conversation?” When you listen to some guru tell you to “wake up,” what do you think that means?

I think for longer than I’ve had the words for it, I’ve been stuck “awake.” I don’t claim enlightenment. I don’t claim special privileges or awareness. I claim “noticed patterns.” I noticed the emotional patterns from my abusive mom so I could anticipate whether or not I was going to get beaten, something I cared about destroyed, or could be safe-enough that day. I noticed people’s relationship patterns and dancing words. I noticed how people exercised or squandered power. I noticed how people responded to me when I presented the same information in different ways. I noticed how I felt before, during, and after writing. I found more words. I found patterns that couldn’t be found any other way.

Naturally, I alienated myself that much further. My goals and desires so diverged from normal, I moved away. My whims so freely arbitrary sometimes I’m cruising too-rich neighborhoods in a too-expensive truck with “Little Boxes” playing on repeat in my head as unironic fascists fail to figure out Google Maps. A normal person would tell you about how they’ve invited me to dinner and always been polite, because that’s what’s important when you’re thoughtless and complicit; you’re still part of the team.

My witnessing of consequences for corrupt and incompetent uses of power feels more caring, thoughtful, committed, and truthful than whatever “love” ties most people or families together. My effort to learn about messy complicated things and attempt to break them down into something actionable or workable is the language I want reciprocated. I’m not operating on a default setting no matter how often I adopt normative ways of getting alongside.

That’s where I am. Next to you, if and when “you” show up. If I get a return text after I send 10. If I can wait patiently for the exact right window to say something that won’t register as my otherwise burdensome invitation. Pause for a second and resist the urge to read this as “woe is me.” I’m not sad. I’m not describing a pitiful existence. I’m just alone and don’t really fit. I didn’t “do that” to myself. I’m not choosing it like some fancy martyr. I’m only the kind of alone in that I’m writing, and you’re reading, and I’m never going to get to read about you in the same way.

[1254] Turn Baby Turn

Today is a good day. Most of my days are good, but today is an “official” good day where one of my longest-standing problems, a pending bankruptcy ruling, was resolved. I’m back to normal broke instead of under the heel of predatory debt service. After much otherwise stress and increasingly frantic emails with the law firm, this little chapter is done.

I wanted to compound my day. I’ve been thinking about my former “best friend” and our dynamic. He tried to get into politics. He made a lot of connections that, ultimately, didn’t seem to really serve the goal, but practically speaking might, remotely, serve mine. I’m building Civic Mirror. The handful of local organizers I’ve started talking to are getting jazzed and throwing out more and more names of people they want me to talk to, perhaps present to, and we’re exploring ways to get it funded so I can focus on the vibe-coding and not have to spend a week door dashing in order to afford the ability to do so.

It’s been…maybe a year or more? since I last said anything to my former best friend. But I was feeling inspired. I wrote what was mostly a dunking-on “fuck you”-esc message about how embarrased he should be about his lies to his mother, the police, and the aunt of the kid he’s pretended to adopt. I told him I resented him using my work and time against me (to rehab a house that, when flipped, only cost me money, making him and his parents even.) If you don’t know, this prison-destined child pulled a gun on me, who he lied to the police about what happened. It was the nail in the coffin of our dynamic that had been deteriorating for a couple years.

Predicatably, he did not take my invitation to support the project at $200/month in tax deductible donations. He didn’t like the poetic justice I was seeking in the idea that he’d be working or sacrificing anything in service to my goals, ironically politically. He didn’t take kindly to the suggestion that his behavior in any way needed to be materially accounted for or met with any standard of truth or humanity. What’s tragic about it, is that it was predictable. When you become as broken as people like my mom or uncle in that I know precisely where you’re stuck and how you will respond, that’s the special kind of death.

I’m an idealist. I believe in trying to maximize potential, even if it’s explicitly cold and caluculating. Him, as a person, means nothing to me anymore, and didn’t the moment he picked his selfish lies over our 25 years of a dynamic. Would I turn down a political connection? I’m not under any illusions about his capacity for guilt. I’m not looking for him to validate my effort, apologize, or admit anything. I wanted $200/month to keep working on a thing celebrating what he forsook. He even gave me an awkward political brush-off in the text lol.

We can’t have nice things because they don’t exist unless you bring them into the world, protect them from the people who will destroy them as reflexively as a reactive cat, or as methodically as a hateful, still reactive, supreme court justice. The value, the goal, the practice…they all have to exist outside of and independent of any story you impose. It’s not about titles like “best friend.” It’s not about years spent. It’s not about any given despotic detail you want to offer about your dismal interaction. It’s about right now.

Right now, can you be honest? Nope, lol. Right now, can you see the harm you cause? Nope. Can you be bothered to expand your perspective to include things that don’t make you feel good, but are no less true? That will tell you the story of every corrupted heart up and down chains of power. That will tell you every story of love and loss. When your romance, your idealism, your “hope,” start to get the better of you, make a prediction. I didn’t think I was going to walk away with $200/month on top of my good news today. I thought a selfish, stuck, ugly no-longer-an-individual was going to keep up his act.

What you need to understand is that so will whomever has been on your mind as I’m writing about him. He’s not special. They aren’t special. They’re the banality of evil bred through neglect and denial. You can choose to play with them, play off them, or get played by them. You can choose to practice a different set of values and exercises of your time altogether. Me, also kinda psychopath-y, probably autistic if not, pokes my head in from time to time to, in a manner, emipircally test my biases. Do people change and get better? Maybe 1 or 2, little by little, over time. Ones who lie, dance, and lie again? Never. People are animals. You gotta protect your individual.

I imagine dying a lot. Of old age, of course. But getting to a point where it really does start to feel appealing. After I’ve outlived everyone I give a shit about. After I’ve accomplished basically everything I set my mind to. After I’ve watched everyone and everything I care about die in 1,000 ways before they ever actually die. This is just part of that rotation. One more cliche spoke on the wheel that never made it anywhere.

[1253] Howl At My Ass

I don’t think I trust democracy. Take a really deep breath, because I can already feel your assumptions overwhelming the many different points I’ll be attempting to make that usually aren’t heard anyway. I certainly don’t trust any authoritarian. What both have in common is my distrust of people.

I don’t meet many people. I, generally, spend my time navigating reactive animals. I don’t meet many individuals. I don’t hear many novel insights. I’m mostly stuck, awake, trying to “survive” the circumstances launched my direction while trying to stay in touch with my own sense of being, values, motivation, and perspective.

That’s a lot packed into 2 little paragraphs already. My first line was shared by the founders of The U.S. A constitutional republic is not democracy. We gloss over this colloquially. Our historical, baseline disposition, is one that was shaped by the horrors of our behavior towards one another. We have good reasons and instincts to hate our neighbors, fear invaders, and protect whatever we’ve established as an adaptation that got us this far.

Widen your lens a bit and think about where trust actually lies. I, more or less, trust processes. I don’t “believe” in them, I get to regularly account for their consequences and add up stats. The process of evolution by natural selection trumps your opinion of what looks or feels best-suited. Scientific processes of concurrent independent verification and falsification are more trust-worthy than vibes. I trust people’s timeless inclinations to be greedy and selfish, so the consequences of capitalist expansion and exploitation are predictable.

I think people understand intuitively they need structure, tyrannical or otherwise. A cell needs a boundary to exist. You’re made of atoms. Your energy is itching to “die” and diffuse everywhere.

Is it unwise to seek a resolution to that tension? When you’re “exhausted” or “overwhelmed” by “politics,” are you just adopting a cliche and fundamentally empty sentiment about the nature of being altogether? What could you trust when you’re fated, in a sense, to be stuck with a fundamentally unreliable, inconsistent, and often extremely dangerous “choice” of who to surrender a meaningful amount of power over your life to?

You need a process. You need a regular exertion of your energy that reconstitutes a reliable enough structure to keep surviving, and hopefully not just so. Part of my process is writing. Another part is creatively expressing through wood work and music. I try to structure my life so it is fundamentally “open” to new experiences and allows me to speak truthfully and consistently to the powers I’m often at the mercy of. 

Have I “failed” in having 20-something odd-jobs over 22 years, working often less than a year at each or not working for months or years at a time between them? The alternative is eating away at what I think it is to be human. I could make excuses. I’m better than “good” at any job I take. I could cash the checks, keep quiet, play along, and then in no uncertain terms I might snap and actually kill myself when I can no longer even see where I exist.

The stakes are pretty high for me. It’s real life. I can come up with all the fun analogies and “game” language about what things are like, but at the end of the day, I respect and fear my power to destroy as much or moreso than I do to build or protect. I’m fundamentally tense and angry. I’m fundamentally exhausted and overwhelmed by all the stupid. I’m fundamentally and desperately overflowing with hatred for what I know intellectually is akin to millions of dogs barking, but as an individual, refuse to believe they don’t have a choice.

It’s a tyrannical idea that lingers over everything I do or say. I make choices. If I’m going to claim that, I don’t have a choice in whether I believe you have that same capacity. I don’t get a choice if you don’t. I don’t get to dignify and explain my conscious experience if you’re an NPC. The weight is nearly unbearable.

Why? Well, I want to live. I want to live well. I want to live abundantly. I want to create and express and speak the truth. I’m choosing those. When you’re not, I’m literally under attack. I’m drafted into a war I did not choose. I can’t just live like I want. I have to carry the weight and implication of your lies, your policy, your grift, and your mythological story of your power and importance over me and to my life. I have to suffer you whether I want to or not.

I grew up in an abusive household. My mom was the tyrant. Her irrational emotionality ensured I lived in constantly aware fear every single moment. I developed months-long headaches. I spent years in anhedonia. I became an avatar and extension of her cruelty. I wasn’t making choices, I was embodying reactive subjugation. I was at the mercy of forces that are incapable of mercy. I was dressing it up as pride. I was a bully. I was ambivalent to how you felt because I could no longer feel.

I’m still a product of that. I’ve, technically, spent more time under that spell than I’ve been an actual adult. I still don’t feel much beyond visceral anger, occasional happiness or joy, or kinda nothing. It’s easier to feel with a few drinks or under a hallucinogen, but whether I’m actually autistic or broken, I’m absolutely something different than a “normal” person. I have distance and dialogue that either interrupts my reactivity or accompanies it in real time. I’m watching. I’m recording. I’m checking. That I’m narrating my experience at all is “weird.” Animals don’t do that.

I trust that if I maintain my sense of truth or honesty and demonstrate it like this, I will have something reliable I can return to when I’m lost. If I wasn’t doing that, this wouldn’t help. If I can’t see the flow and path of where my thoughts are taking me, then I’ll arrive at consequences I probably don’t want and remain confused and upset about what’s happening to me. It’s work. It’s work every day to pay attention and try to dig out a real and persistent answer to “why.” And now you’re bombarded with algorithm assumptions and answers to keep you “engaged” and infinitely disconnected.

My sense of well-being, rightly or wrongly, is often tied to my sense of financial security. Even if people never care to nor develop the capacity to really see or understand me, money talks. Money buys their reliable complicity, silence, or movement in my preferred direction. Any rich person can functionally treat your will like an Uber. That’s why they focus on paying off and forcing NDAs on your “representatives.” You, little one, can kick and scream all you want, but your predictable helpless reactivity is already built into the equation.

This is the threat of violent revolutionary moments. It’s not what anyone prefers, but when all outlets for the expression of power or grievance get blocked, the most truthful underlying process makes itself known. One, or both of us, will die. If you’re chronically under an abusive dynamic, that doesn’t really matter to you. You don’t really care if you live or die because you don’t have the capacity to care anymore. It’s not that you can’t do the math or see the future, it’s that there’s no emotional resonance for either better or worse.

I think culturally we’re in the same space I was growing up. How you felt didn’t matter. What you want was decided upon in an arbitrary or predatory way. Your closest allies or theoretically most trusted friends and family are weaponized against you. Your logic rebuked. Your honesty, or, especially as a child, your inability to regulate criminalized and you’re basically told you deserve to be tortured and every level of suffering that comes with the reactions to your behavior you’ve earned. I think we’re in psychological hell. I think it manifests physically and socially. I think that because I can reliably predict the reactive dismissive nature of basically every online interaction or forgone conclusion sentiment from nearly everyone I ever meet testifies to the extent of the damage thousands of times a day just in my own life.

Maybe I’m lucky that the pain of trying to be human is less than the pain of playing along. My anger at myself and the confusion about how I should best conduct my day pales in comparison to the “I’m going to get arrested” energy I have in response to the absurdity, complacency, and excuses of people I’d otherwise wish to get along with, if only practically. I’m not a forgone conclusion. That’s an important space for me to protect. There’s a real chance I burn down and contradict the things I profess are the most important to me in maintaining my identity as an individual human. I can’t claim to be making choices if that isn’t true.

You, though? Do you feel that in any sense whatsoever? You fit, right? You belong. You know how the bills are getting paid. You know what power you do or don’t have. You know how accessible the irony and detachment can be deployed. What are you if not judge, jury, and executioner? Do you feel attacked by my abstract invoking of “you?” Who do you think I’m talking to?

I don’t think “it” or “things” will “get better.” I don’t know that they’ve been as good as they are often described. I think, objectively, we’ve coasted on the backs of a relative handful of technological breakthroughs and incredible insights of individual thinkers, researchers, or conquerors. I think we live in a kind of runoff space. It think we’re the residue of efforts “we” will never constitute of our own volition. A small sliver might create something that reconstitutes what it takes to survive for the briefest moment, and “the masses” will do as they do.

What’s my individual responsibility to that thought and how it makes me feel? Ride it in a self-justified way until I die? Weaponize it and excuse my capacity to exploit how I know it makes you vulnerable? Sit alone and pretty in my space doing whatever it is I do? All I can do, all I should do, is trust the process. Keep watching myself and seeing if that thought or feeling changes as I inhabit new environments. Keep looking for the words I didn't know I was going to type until I typed them. Keep expressing what anchors to me independent of me feeling like I had any choice in the matter, and then choose to reconstitute my brain matter.

But, my god, there’s just so much fucking barking.

[1252] Won On One

Over the last year or so, I’ve started to “feel” like my life makes considerably more sense within an “artist” frame. Whenever I caught the movie about the group that made their secret mall apartment, it kicked on a light that I’ve been unable to dim. I listen to Joel Madden discuss the work and mastering artistry with other creative people. His insights track with my experience and desires for how I conduct my life. I get hung up on what I might be a “master” of, or what I’m attempting.

I can say with confidence I was a master at the religion vs science space for a couple years. That was a very tangible, count the number of books read, citations I could put behind anything I wrote or argued, bring up questions in class that stumped the T.A. level of “mastery.” I’ve mastered individual video games. I’m extremely adept at persuading cats to like me, but we all know they can never be mastered. After 2 years I think I had finally just started to be considered masterful as a DCS assessor.

I’ve always been a smart kid, though. The kind of smart that knows how much you don’t know regardless of how much you may have learned. In a deep way, I don’t know that it’s possible to “master” something in the colloquial sense. I think you can practice. I think that’s why they call it practicing medicine and martial arts.

So much of my focus I think appears superficially on myself. I’m not that complicated though. I’ve had to navigate as many ridiculous, arbitrary, and confusing things from ignorant places as much as anyone. I write because “things,” rarely, “make sense” to me. In order for something to make sense I think you have to care. I think you have to feel consequences. I think you have to really want something.

I care about my experience of my life. When my brain is flooded with stupid shit, fascist posturing, or edicts and power attempting to put me in my place, I revolt. It’s very straightforward. It sounds a lot like, “Fuck you.” I care about having to experience the consequences of people’s stupid behavior. When they wield power irresponsibly or from an entitled place, people die. When they project their religious mythology onto reality, they don’t just die, but those who killed them feel deeply that they deserved it.

The things I think I’m good at both took practice and also took nothing at all besides a decision. I learned how to be more patient, even if my insatiable instinct for “now” is as volatile as it’s ever been. I choose to tell the truth. That can be the truth of my feelings, confusion, hatred, or ambivalence. I can feel when there’s a shivering child tempted to lie, and choose differently. I’m serving myself, not a catastrophic vision and set of assumptions about what that truth will negatively impact.

I don’t fit in. I don’t think I look very “adult.” I don’t pass in the minds of most people I meet as the kind of thing that will just let them carry on in whatever manner they are. It doesn’t mean I don’t accept them or that my head is flooded with negative judgments. It does mean I will almost immediately catch the point in which you’re hanging your self-conception on excuses. I will, begrudgingly, accurately, see where you start and stop, and you’ll know that I know.

I’m a fan of saying a reason is something that brings you closer to the story of your responsibility for something. An excuse is something that puts distance between you and the thing. They function very differently. I like to claim a lot of reasons for my behavior, whether it’s to leave jobs, “friendships,” spend money I don’t really have, or pick some number of months to engage in what seems like “random” projects or tasks. Again, I think it looks indulgent. I think it looks immature. I think it looks like I just can’t be bothered to find someone to settle down with and a job to keep me “secure” or “humble.”

I’ve been chasing the life I want to lead my entire adult life. Lead being the operative word. I’m often given the responsibility, but only a few times have I been able to play lead. The house parties, the coffee shop, and what I still hope to accomplish on the land. Ok, sure, I was the head of “The Gs,” our little lost boy troop of friends in elementary and middle school, but that hardly counts.

What does it mean to lead in today's world where corruption wins? Where racism reigns supreme? Where complacency and complicity are as thick as the air the EPA is probably no longer allowed to scan for pollutants? For me, it’s looked like a ton of interpersonal sacrifice. I leave jobs that pretend to be concerned with the well-being of their clients. I stop talking to people who talk so much in service to one conclusion, “It is what it is.” I take chances with people my gut tells me are “doomed to fail,” and then time proves it.

And then I return here. I examine. I look for things I might have done differently. I see if the pattern has repeated. I arrive at the same conclusions, now with new flourishes and details. If I don’t own it or it’s not really mine, it’s not safe. If I can’t enforce the discipline or rules I’ve set for myself, they don’t exist. If I’m spending the majority of my time emotionally wrought about any individual, the past, or some personal failure, I’m taking too long to learn what it is I needed from that situation and probably need to shut the fuck up and get back to work, or eat something.

It’s been a struggle to write recently. I’ve had nothing to write about. “The world,” is still trending towards fire. I’m still first-world broke. I’ve found vibe-coding, and despite my lack of knowledge, money, and the competition for my time, I’m on a new track of meeting people and exploring the potential of having given my life over to “what could be.” I’ve worked incredibly hard to get my website to where it is and see where I wish to push it. I didn’t let my criticism and cynicism of AI prevent me from noticing and running with the opportunity it seems to be providing. It’s important to me to be that pliable and capable.

What is that? I think about it like the fluidity with which comedians shit on each other. The hate isn’t hate. When I’m picking something apart or poking holes in an official story, it’s an exercise in curiosity. I want to know how we get to a place of shared reality. That’s where the real work, potential, and magic happens. I can’t just believe you like you believe you. I don’t just believe myself. I see what it would take. I speak as though I’m trying to get what I wish to happen. I don’t know that many people who operate that way.

I think that’s part of why it’s been hard to write. If I’m disoriented, who’s orienting me? If I’m perfectly oriented, who’s validating it? I’m not looking to be reassured or celebrated for their own sake. I want you to actually like the things I’m trying to build, find utility in them. I want you to actually feel the sense of ownership or relief and possibility that I do when I talk about the land or how we might work together. There’s a reality I’m experiencing that I don’t register from almost anyone.

That is, I feel their obligations. I feel their responsibilities. I feel their “adulting.” I feel the infuriating intransigence of their memes and vague-booking. I feel everything that they claim they can’t do, don’t know, or won’t try. I feel how impossible it is to do everything I both want to do, or demonstrate in perpetual spite, practically every day. I just took a temp job where I likely pissed off 15 people who wanted the task of applying stickers to calendar misprints to last another 4 hours. I wanted to be home, and I work quickly. We got done at 11 instead of 3:30. To me, a fool thinks we got paid less, because I got my time back. Time I’m not watching obnoxious lower-class people “joke” about how slow we should go.

The reality is that we live in a stupid culture if we’re concerned about paying 15 people over the course of several days to waste time and resources covering “Decmember” on a wall calendar. You have the money for that task, Staples, but not to pay your employees a living wage? You, poor person gig-worker, think the solution to your problems is an incidental squeezing of their stupidity for an extra $100? I don’t have the kind of brain that can “check out.” If I’m not working as well and as fast as I can, I’m in pain. I’m angry. Not just at my circumstances, but at you in your childish blindness, and ever-abstractions of systems I’m ill-equipped to alter while being consumed by them.

On some level, it absolutely sucks to know what you’re capable of. That memory persists. Whether or not it’s going to antagonize or reassure is news to me each day. There’s a story I could tell of my grit and genius that’s managed to figure out things in weeks most couldn’t in years. There’s a story of my entitled indulgent desire to be entertained and own “pointless” things like black T-shirts while I go bankrupt and build half-assed fences. What makes either true? I know neither, by themselves, is true enough. I’m not one framing of my behavior. I don’t “feel” either is true. I can see the arguments for the extremes and every step between. I want to protect that. I’m not indecisive nor a devil’s advocate. I just understand how the spell of a story works.

I can see the story because I’m writing it. I can feel what feels like mine versus what’s been imposed. What feels like it desperately wants me to believe or go along or ignore the implications. Your stories are inconsistent, at best. Lies, often. Unflattering, unhelpful, and deeply uniformed. I want to be nothing like that I hear and navigate. I want the deeply personal evidence on display truth. This, again, whether an “artist” framing feels helpful. Biggest band in the world, or “merely” paying the bills, you’re either singing your songs or you’re not. I don’t sound like you, and I never want to start.

[1251] Earth Turns Slowly

What does it take to "genuinely believe" in something?

We hear things all the time. We say things constantly. We've developed entire systems of law trying to parse how much we "really meant" to do the bad thing. We claim "deeply held beliefs" reflexively and defensively.

I consider myself a deeply skeptical person. There's a deep and abiding irony about that, because to a lot of people I come across exceptionally arrogant and sure of myself. To my mind, they're reacting to a scrutinizing methodology more than accurately diagnosing me. At the same time, I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be skeptical, and the curiosity I lead with often registers as a threat.

I ask questions. I ask a lot of questions, first of myself, and then about the world around me. I get very few answers, but the ones I do tend to be consistent in their character and patterns. I don't land on "right" and "wrong" very often, but if I do, it's because it feels like the answer starts to exist well beyond my opinion of the situation or my feelings. Racism? Wrong, full stop, all the time. Not jokes, actual racism. Actual discriminating behavior based on innate superficial differences is an artifact of our fear-based animal natures, not some defensible thesis to be debated indefinitely.

Yet, you see how I allow for racist jokes in my reasoning? Surely, I'm aware that modern discourse pushed heavily to regard words as violence. "Normalizing" probably popped into your head. And slowly, but surely, the drift starts to happen. The ambiguity of words, intent, and primacy of our subjective experience of the cultural landscape takes over.

Think of the implications! The slippery slope. Am I so dismissive of your lived experience!? To me, we arrive at several answers to several questions in this moment. People will assume your intent. People will react. People will draw dozens of conclusions in a catastrophized vision that summarizes your entire being and the state of the world. Do they genuinely believe in these moments? I don't think so. I think there's real consequences to contend with and behavior they'll engage in that can't be ignored. But I remain skeptical that your reactive self is your believing self.

I think we under-appreciate and are not that aware of how often we're reacting. It's why we feel helpless so often. That's a real reaction to circumstances that haven't been articulated. We haven't seen, heard, or felt our power, so as a consequence we start to believe we have none. We're abused children, battered wives, or otherwise cogs in abstract machines and isms.

I've felt decently politically helpless my entire life. I live in Indiana. No one has cared about the environment here. No one cares if there's money for a good education and teachers. No one's bothered to pressure businesses to pay workers fairly or make healthcare accessible. This state has nearly criminalized labor organizing entirely. I'm pushing 40. My whole adult life is hearing, "It is what it is," about every problem under the sun. You put your head down, work harder, focus on the little things, and move on.

That's psychologically insufferable for someone like me. I don't accept your flaccid reaction. I don't accept that I can't find a way. I want to fight for what I know does or can exist all the time. I'm stuck deeply skeptical that "the world" will bother to stay together moment to moment, let alone conform to your typical cliche truisms at the mercy of your uninterrogated perception. You didn't even ask what could be.

Whether you read one or 100 self-help books, they will boil down to "act." Do something. Move in the world, little by little, consistently, and you will start to see, hear, and feel something that contrasts with how you've been conditioned. Take the small walk. Deliberately smile. Put on the show you enjoy and consciously sit down to take it in for that 20 minutes or hour of your day that can actually feel like it's yours. Agency takes practice. To practice agency, you need to recognize and concede how often you're not acting like the agent of your own life.

Conservatives take this sentiment too far. Liberals, not far enough. This is why both are necessary in active healthy debate over debatable things. I can't decide tomorrow that my job, any job, should pay me enough to live like the middle-class lifestyle of my parents. I'm not rabidly inclined to hoard my privileges or legacy because of my poor preferred judgment about poor people.

I'm someone who likes to employ the words "first-world poor." I have a lot of stuff. I'm healthy enough. I have a degree. I'm fed. I have a support system. I indulge and try to invest at "my level" of, technically, poverty. What do people believe about me when I'm dropping off their DoorDash order? What does "society" believe of someone who is unmarried, chaotically organized, and boasts of watching every episode of thousands of TV shows?

Catch the framing drift? Catch the assumptions?

I'm society. DoorDash is an inelegant solution to several systemic and practical problems. I can count on one hand the amount of marriages I'd consider flirting with "healthy." Does it matter that most of my TV watching has occurred between 9PM and 5AM at twice the speed and often while I'm doing other things simultaneously?

The agent that is me is choosing how to spend his time, and often choosing differently than the defaults the moment they become viable. You call me to hang? I'm out the door. There's a show in Chicago? See you in a few days, cats. Something needs built? I work until I physically have to stop.

I've been as critical of A.I. as anyone. I've played with it here and there, thought it was shit and over-hyped. It got better. All of a sudden, in spite of what I feel is still derided as "vibe-coding," I was able to create things in my mind's eye that had practical application to my life. I've tried to get my music organized for literally decades. I built a music organizer that 15 different ones haven't been able to accomplish in a couple days. I wanted a better way to track the 200 or so comedians and musicians I've been following for the last 5 years. It became real. I have calendars based around where I live or if I'm around Chicago that show me every pending show I could go to. It's not "hard" or that "complicated," it just didn't exist yet how I wanted and needed.

What I learned in creating those I started to apply to civic-mirror.com. It's my latest bid to demonstrate what I think. When you're someone that asks a lot of questions, you can create a lot of problems for yourself. When you plug that process into "politics" as a broad catch-all idea…well, good luck to you.

I know, from my own life, the power of my agency. I've built my own home. I've started businesses. I've gone to 439 performances over the last 5 years. I can, and do. That agency is betrayed often. It doesn't matter what I can do, I exist along with other people and in environments that undermine it. The distinction is real. I don't let myself off the hook. I respect what's fucking me.

A.I. is the latest testimony I have of what happens when what I think I can do is functionally unrestrained. It has cost me more money than I realistically have. It has resulted in me feeling light-headed and "behind" or like it's never "enough." But it's a real living example of me trying to fix what I think is broken created, exhaustively, the moment I found the path to try and do so.

There's a significantly painful thing about being someone who does things or tries to create things. "No one," seems to appreciate the struggle or what it has "really taken" to get as far as you have. I'm going on 3 months of almost constant "tending." Learning how to navigate the A.I. drift. Learning the back-end infrastructure to make the features I want work. Finding ways to pay for it. I had it print a list of "problems solved" that is several hundred entries long, mostly forgotten, because there's a hundred more staring me down. I've worked on it while door dashing and eating Easter dinner. It's working right now as I type.

Another answer I find in a regular patterned way is, "Oh, cool," or "that's nice," or "you should…" or "why didn't you…?"

Even if, presumably, people have felt like me, can see the utility, can flirt with the hope of a meaningful difference or change, they still don't access their agency. There's a distance. There's an instinct and a reflex that they are already too-taxed, too-tired, too-busy, and this, too, is more than they can handle or deal with. Do they truly believe that? I don't think so. Anymore than I think they can't afford to come with me to the $10 show, that they haven't in 5 years. Anymore than they don't have the time to watch the 20 minute episode.

What you do, or especially don't do, becomes who you are. You are training yourself, every moment of every day, to believe that you don't matter, can't choose, and can't manifest what you think and feel needs to exist. In woo-woo land, I think "anything" exists precisely because of whatever you may wish to describe as that creative force. For "spiritual" people who want to terminate at an undulous and diffuse "god," why not? For excuse-ridden ideologues who bemoan the concept of "god" to judge and replace personal responsibility? Go fuck yourselves.

Because none of us can ever know what someone else "truly believes," we're left with what they do. I build. You can't argue with that. I try. You pretend there's a real "you" in their playing devil's advocate and picking stupid fights to some discernible end. In reality, as far as we can share it, you're defensively lying and reacting in lieu of exerting your own agency.

I see this in addiction, whether your problem is work-a-hol or alcohol. I see this in your sentiments about "politics" or "the world." I see this in the reticence to try and fail and sacrifice. I see this in stuck ruminated narratives about obligations and standards you hold to such an extent they become weaponized against you. Maybe your "care for a family member" is at the heart of what's destroying you. Your "work ethic" is ripe for the exploitative capitalist preying indefinitely on your nature. Your "exhaustion" has nothing to do with the nature of your tasks, and everything to do with the inability or unwillingness to figure out if you're really choosing, or would really choose them altogether.

I sacrifice a lot of otherwise "comfort" or "normalcy" in service to what I believe in, which leaves me often alone or feeling alienated. I can usually recognize a good parent from afar when it's clear how much they give up to ensure their kids are in as good a position as they can make them. I can feel that, "What the fuck is up with this guy?" in practically everything I do or say about how I live or what I think. But I can manage because I'm just navigating reactions, not hearing what anyone genuinely believes. I find this incredibly sad and a lonely place to be.

Thankfully, it's not "everyone" and it's not "always." I have people I care about and they care about me, and they don't just say so. I have people who are thoughtful and intentional, sometimes, often, or more often than not. I have examples they've set and histories I can rely on when my own story starts to feel acute or wobbly. Do I genuinely believe they care about me? I don't have to, anymore than I have to argue about what is or isn't racism. There's a transcendent reality I feel and appeal to that doesn't waste time reactively undermining what's consistently demonstrated.

When my "best friend" consistently undermined my trust in increasingly escalating ways, I stopped engaging. It wasn't a faith-based relationship. It wasn't, "But 25 years!" It was, you stopped holding your end of the bargain, and changed your behavior. He, unlike a lot of people, knows better. His relationship, truly, didn't change towards even "me" per se, it changed towards the truth. I'm not going to sacrifice myself in service to people who unburden themselves from telling the truth. You can be confused about the truth. You can wrestle with the truth. But you can't forgo it entirely if you're going to get anything from me. There's no "But my subjective experience!" sympathy over here. Did you start with a lie? Yes? Cool, go fuck yourself.

I'm the kind of person who wants "the world." I want "everything" to be "better." I want to clean up the trash in the drainage ditches along Cline Avenue because it's there and I can and it should be cleaned up and the dozens of people who threw trash out of their window are wrong and lazy and ridiculous and will be for the rest of time. But also, that we don't have a system that reliably pays someone a livable wage to clean up after those cunts is a problem. It's easy to say, see, and understand. It's apparently fucking impossible to get people to feel and act as though that's the reality.

The excitement over A.I. I think is rooted in the people who've suffered experiences similar to mine. I don't need your permission to do and fix and manifest. I don't need to field your excuses and navigate your feelings. I don't need to court your reaction. I don't need Reddit irony. I need my will and creativity and persistence clawing away each inch of achievement that hopefully speaks to people as willing and capable as I am. If I'm a business-owning tech guy, do I need Jim Banks's racist tropes about non-English speaking truck drivers? Or my autonomous fleet? Do I need hillbilly opinions about water use? Or pay off 7 city council members?

In comparison to, and hopefully unlike those who've been corrupted by power, mine is relatively muted. I don't fear or shy away from my capacity to build or destroy, but I also don't pre-emptively look for the excuses and license to do either. I had the idea first, so it's right to do and how I'm doing it by default? I had the money so however I spend it is fine? I suffer delusions of being the best, smartest, most just, etc. therefore…? I'm willing to entertain and believe the idea that I'm catastrophically wrong. It's why I write. One of you, one day, may actually think along with me and go, "You know, this was really fucked up right here." Polymarket puts that at less than 1% likely.

I could see civic-mirror turning into "the" tool, like our shitty social media environments have turned into "the internet." I could see it going nowhere but being fleetingly useful to me and a few nerds. But the point is that I actually see it. I created it first. I demonstrated what I believe about myself and the world I want to live in. In what obfuscating arbitrary universe can that be regarded as "failing?"

[1250] The Writer's Room

 I’m going to take a deliberate pause. When I tell you that I’ve been in something akin to a “blacked out” state for about a month, I want you to hear that as the complicated road leading to it, the time spent in it, and the means of coping/escaping it I’m hoping to find here.

I’ve been “adrift” for the last few years, at least. My jobs have all been exercises of walking fine lines between complicit negligence and practical necessity. My friends have generally either fallen off the radar or are so reliably busy or overwhelmed you start to feel guilty and disingenuous reaching out and inviting at all. I’ve got hobbies that are mostly solo or cost money I don’t really have. The shining light that has beamed through my otherwise years of living like this is a friend from high school who moved back to the area we grew up. We’ve been to dozens of shows together and spend plenty of time getting food or drinking and hanging out.

I’m perfectly happy to indulge. I like squeezing as much joy out of the things I like as I can. I don’t need to drink myself stupid every night, but that does not mean I do not want several refrigerators stocked with every good beer or wine I’ve ever tasted. At whatever point in time in my life that I pivoted towards prioritizing having my time more than money, I’m “happy” to spend that time “doing nothing” because it’s my nothing. I’m not assigning myself arbitrary tasks nor letting my attention get hijacked by selfish chaos actors known as “other people.”

My whole life I’ve struggled with wanting to be seen and get a certain amount of attention and recognition. I don’t know how much of this is my born-in disposition. I don’t know how much of it developed as a coping mechanism as a means of keeping myself safe in my mom’s abusive household. I do know that somewhere deep, when I’m doing something “good” or “big” or “smart,” that it provides a level of satisfaction and sense of security and being that doesn’t compare to anything else. I say this even in the face of the love and attention and care of those in my life who were not my crazy mom. People looking out for you is a different kind of thing than you figuring out what you need to do for yourself.

At the same time, some of the most romanticized periods of my life were from college. It’s when I thought I had a team or friend group that I could rely on. It’s who I thought I’d be trying to visit and party with in the future. It was a moment in the sun of a level of community and connection that I have not been able to find nor reproduce for 15 years. No one’s stopping over to eat dinner together, if they’re even responding to texts today. No one’s liking and sharing on dying, antagonizing socials.

When you spend as much time on your own as I do, you might be a gigantic consumer of media. I’ve watched 45 movies, mostly terrible comedies offered for free on YouTube, while I do this coding project precisely because they don’t need your attention. For as generic and awkward as they might be, they are a kind of persistent reminder of the collaborative effort it takes to manifest that kind of creativity. They’re playing. They’re contributing their pieces. I often have no sense as to what I’m contributing, or come to understand what I thought I was is something worth shaming or judging me for.

At work, I’m an authority figure. I’m discussing complicated topics like addiction or abusive dynamics in accessible and open or friendly ways. I’m often speaking to what I practice that allows me to stay on the straight and narrow and not let the moment-to-moment excuses give me license to treat myself and the people around me poorly. It never ends until you die. There are infinitely ignorant and evil forces that will kill you without blinking; they’ll be proud about it, and they’ll shape the world you inhabit until you think you deserve it. You’ll be betrayed. You’ll waste and miss opportunities. You’ll fail more times than you can remember. And if you can’t find a way to enjoy it, that joy will not arrive on its own. If you keep your head down and try to power through it, by the time you look up, the tour date will have passed, the friends will have died off, and the “If I could move like I used to” statements will flood in.

When you’re hyper-focused, time slows way down, but in a way that doesn’t feel antagonizing. It’s living potential space that you begin occupying. You can paint the future and implications. You can see yourself occupying and explaining your role. You could be perfectly delusional, but in the moment that’s not seriously considered. Things make too much sense. You can naturally see what you can or should do next. I describe it as a kind of mania, but mania I’ve ridden in the past to create many things I enjoyed or am uniquely proud of. It’s knocking on the door of compulsive. It’s begging for what I imagine the license someone like Steve Jobs took to treat people like shit. It’s an attempt to immortalize something about you that runs deep in a way that can’t be argued with.

That doesn’t mean that by itself it’s good or bad. It’s just the nature of the force at work. If you recognize a force in you, then it’s your job to try to account for it, not glorify, weaponize, or deny it. I want to be consumed by meaningful work. I don’t want to be eaten alive until there’s nothing else about me worth talking about.

A.I. is giving me the opportunity to feed this space indefinitely. It costs more money than I can pay for indefinitely right now, but also that means I see weeks-straight of time that I can capitalize on. A.I. also does a terrible job of maintaining context and not catching drift. I get a concurrent goal/task to learn how to keep the playing field and rules from falling apart as I try to build the big complicated thing altogether.

Meanwhile life is still happening around me. I have bills to pay, so naturally I took a computer stand/arm and found a way to position it in my car so I can run my laptop from my phone’s Wi-Fi and plug into a jumper battery and code between DoorDash orders. That’s normal, right? That’s safe? That’s reasonable? That’s not a story of a desperate need to matter? That’s not being punished by anxiety-driven “my life’s clock is running down” sensibilities regarding efficiency?

I’ve thought, good and hard, about leaving this chair for days. I made cursory preparations like heading into town for food and errands and that experimentation as to whether I could feasibly code from my car. I can. The desire to sort of melt into my environment and this work is very real and very powerful. It’s close to what I felt as a child in what might’ve been described as a budding addiction to video games. I don’t have the same kind of desperate and furious rush, but the world I’m occupying right now is very sticky. It feels “wrong” to do anything else besides maximize my output. It feels like I’d be missing an opportunity window that I’ve been raging at in the rear-view my entire life.