[1247] Mondo Duke

I want to create an exhaustive list of everything that I can recall which sparks anxiety, annoyance, anger, or dread. I want to do this so that I can clarify for myself whether or not there are "simple" or "patterned" reasons that I cannot seem to transcend these feelings. To be sure, I'm only "so" anxious, angry, or dreadful, but they are still "too much" or "enough to be annoying" as to conjure a desire for a better mastery over them. I also want to get better in how I construct my goals, what I fight for, and how to situate new information as I search or build.

I think it needs to be expressed in a kind of meditative flow of run-ons, incomplete, and redundancies, so if you're gonna try to follow along with this next bit, think Ulysses more than Da Vinci Code.

ICE. ICE near me and get-yourself-killed "hero" story. Debt. Treasurer fuckery. All republicans. Complicity. Feckless democrats. Nazi Braun, Rokita, Banks, Beckwith, Spartz. Every bill aimed to destroy education, the environment, bleed me dry, take away rights. Data centers. Provoking attacks from under-appreciating or allowing radicalized ideology. Helpless people dying and disenfranchised even more. The futility of "helping" and my social work jobs. My cramped and sore back, shoulder, neck, and arm muscles. My dry mouth and cold home. The cost to fix my water. The cost to make my home "presentable" and "comfy" instead of merely livable. Disaster hitting my home. Inability to maintain/afford insurance. Scam artists and grifters at every level of otherwise polite society. Every mercy rescinded. Every thing you think you're paying for shifted to you to do yourself. My cats being left alone for a week. The fact that the moment I join a social media site, it begins to die. The general lack of recognition, support, or effort to anything in a sustained combined way. Wasted time in a.d.d. hazes. Whether I get into a study altogether. Drives. the next fight I didn't know I was invited to over nothing or someone's dressed-up psychosis. Unreliable or inconsistent business partners. Getting another miserable job. Not getting another miserable job. Door dashing in my truck. Truck repairs. Getting scammed scrapping. The time and cost to scrap properly. Equipment repairs. Consolidating white trash yard crap. Creating political information roadmap and reporting tool. Gaining any real attention or traction for my writing or tiktok videos. Reconnecting with friends to find out connection as superficial or fraught as presumed by lack of contact all along. All the dust and hair. Cost to get drums in order. Cost of shows I want to get to. "Something" happening to cards before I get them all sold. Inability to ever feel "safe enough" be it either in a mobile living situation or in my shed. "Oh we forgot to tell you…" kind of bullshit from my lawyer. Neglected icy roads/ramps. Desire to confront people who have betrayed or royally pissed me off. Jaw clenching. More sober-house people relapsing. Letting former skills atrophy. The bad guys show no signs of not winning. The most violent and irrational routinely getting their way. Rich fucks who don't tip. The snow/cold. Cost to repair instruments. Brain rot inherent in any amount of social media use, facebook and reddit in particular. Voice suppression. Nerds yelling "shame." Instinct for violence. The idea that the shameless ignorance that endorses things like trump or fascism will never go away and entropy is on its side. Lifetime guarantees that require more steps that its worth. $400 bill for cat bite. No health insurance. Devil's advocates. Non-existent customer service. Predatory "services" in debt consolidation. Knowing people wake up every day motivated to carry out actions in service to things that will kill me and everything I care about. Knowing far more people will sit and watch them the entire time. The oscillation between endless energy and motivation and and void scream to be left alone indefinitely. the unorganized wires. The still leaking parts of the roof, somewhat mitigated. The incomplete porch. No redundant heat. Poorly manufactured and too small heated blanket. No amount of organization of tools ever feels enough. Too many podcasts talking in circles. Overall sense of fakeness and futility. Uninteresting, unhealthy, and redundant meals without high investment. Knots. Oily skin, hair, nails need cut. Cats picking wrong moments for attention. 40 out of 45 games not holding my interest. Ugly/corny jeans. Knowing even when I get the money fundamental cake I'm baked into is made of shit. The depressed, old, complacent and avoidant attitudes of those around me. My hateful family members. Past injustices. Lazy media. Empty cliches. Forced humor. Opportunistic daisy-chains of attention for its own sake. Ill-fitting expensive clothes. Spam. Unroll.me. Grant money that was never really up for grabs in the first place. Gambling as though nothing needs nor is worth the money. AI slop, cadence, redundancy, drift. Corruption normalized. Begrudgingly employing the language of "sin" to best encapsulate level of depravity.  People wasting my time because they can't be bothered to communicate, text back, or use a calendar. Automatic features that can't be silenced, uninstalled, or erased entirely. Performative anger voice. Being boxed into titles and designations I did not ask for like "digital creator." Being a "content" mine to be exploited indefinitely. Every high-profile Nazi and tech nazi. Pride in general. The fact that I've had good reasons over horrible ethics and practices to leave every job I've ever had. Having to spend anywhere from 20 minutes to weeks bringing someone into a world of shared language and reality, if it's ever actually achieved. Headache. Eyes ache. Untrained unsecured neighborhood dogs. The last several lobbies of mechanics I've been in smelling of smoke. The lack of genuine opportunities in the face of a waterfall of condescending cultural normative propaganda otherwise. Watching people with "more important" or "adult" jobs get squeezed and exploited as much or more than me. Retreating to selfish cliches about each's own individual suffering to eschew solidarity or change. Cutting off more than bringing in. Unnecessary pending status. Repeating to me something, sometimes several times, that wasn't complicated to begin with nor needed as many words as you used already. Things working just long enough to give you false hope. The amount of ways I could severely hurt myself doing something routine and how long it would take for anyone to notice. Dependence on money. I always think I'll be better or "things" will be okay with enough money. They kind of are, but then it's never figured out how to sustain the money in a way that isn't otherwise destroying the experience of what the money was for. No amount of money or invites has  has enticed  people to hang that weren't already. Actually likely to be relatively extreme in a.d.d. and/or autism while they became "cool." Stomach acid. Lightheadedness from general sedentary status. Every.Little.Thing like even free tax filing taken away or targeted. Former "heroes" devolving in embarrassing and literally step-by-step trackable ways. Seriously never-ending battle with dust and hair. Cost of everything, but filters in particular in this moment. The sheer amount of things I would do, prepare, and work on in a day or two with the right amount of money, time independent of, but especially with, a team. Discovering the infinite amount of things I do not know with each new things I try. Comedians who genuinely think they're edgy. Ignorance of history. Ads. All fucking ads. Overpriced unpersonalized education courses. Any story of tragedy shared for clicks and not paired with the direct action you can take in response to it. Reliably and consistently knowing how someone is a piece of shit based on a few consistent key details. It's incredibly demoralizing to either betray evidence in service to some ideal or carry what feels like a bias with always incomplete information. No amount of stretching, pummeling, or prodding ever enough. Bleeding the heart of franchises dry. The temptation to do the exact opposite of what I "should" in a feeble attempt to exert agency. Bluetooth. Knowing I don't need something until a few days after I get rid of it. Staring at the thing I don't need. Websites with potential to be great that just idle for a decade or more or destroy themselves. Consciously destroying things in service to profit. Subscription models for things that aren't subscriptions. Almost all forms of tipping. Daylight savings time. Nothing living up to the quality of my IPOD to play music with. Nothing that can handle the amount of music and media I have. Getting routinely punished for telling the truth. Not the "hard" truth. Not the "I'm just a dick calling this the truth. Actually just speaking truthfully and it playing out predictably poorly. Seeming resistance or inability to efficiently organize and engage in collective action. Emerging poorly conducted studies reported as gospel. Treating anything as gospel. "anyone watching this today" comments. Almost always, always talking past people. Spotify. Ticketmaster. Amazon. Too-much fandom. Shaving. shitting. The same slop article about old news pushed to me ten thousand fucking times about something I didn't care about in the first place. Lack of direction or sense of purpose even after acquiring necessary tool or accomplishing next step. Proof of ability betrays desire to do more or demonstrate what I already know. Less Joe Rogan or his sphere of influence than the fact that he and his sphere of influence is another manifestation of our default condition. How all of this, at some point in the day, invokes itself every day. Sign ins and account creation for shit that absolutely doesn't need it. That the writing has been on the wall for how fucked and crazy shit was going to be every step of the way and people still act like we should wait for anything ever.

[1246] Bear Minimum

I don’t even want to proofread this. That should tell you whether you should bother with this one. No, I didn't mean "bare."

Everything I’m going to attempt to talk about is complicated by the cold and snow. I need discipline. I can feel too many things competing for my attention. It’s been preventing me from finding the peace I can usually get a sip of from writing. I think I’m going to avoid spending any time contextualizing something for “the random reader.”

I find myself returning to an idea that anymore, I want the bare minimum. My life has swung back and forth between austerity and indulgence. One was a project in service to a sense of long-term stability or growth. The other a reaction to the creeping understanding that I no longer believed I was going to achieve either.

I owe money. Not really, but according to criminal institutions, thieving family and friends, and the capricious greed of former employers and my state. The processes afforded to me in order to discharge debts have lied, wasted time, and are now salivating to squeeze me for every single penny I already don’t have.

You can only exempt $450 in Indiana of money in your bank account. Doesn’t matter if you have a $316 electric bill, $520 due to a credit card, $1800 in legal fees you borrowed, and $650 more you needed thinking you’d get your water running. if your account says more than $450, “It’s complicated,” according to my lawyer as to why actually filing still hasn’t taken place. Gotta make sure those transactions aren’t pending if you’ve moved to pay the bills too. Kentucky? You can have $8,000 in cash. But, I live in Indiana, one of the shittiest states in the country.

But it gets dumber. I’ve been telling my lawyer for weeks how much my “business” is worth. You know, the LLC with no assets that’s renting a house on the back of good graces from one of its partners. Super stable. My 25% stake gets me, anymore, a couple hundred bucks a month, maybe. Less now with a couple relapses and disappearances. This, another hiccup for the attorneys who can’t seem to understand I’m not trying to hide from them a house my business does not own, I certainly don’t own, and I can’t even expect a consistent meaningful profit from.

What are the fixes? Sell things? Once they’re gone, they’re gone. Also, the whole country is aggressively bleeding people dry, so it’s not like there’s too many itchy buyers for your old broken vehicles. I’m trying to get into a drug study. I’m poised to check in Monday. There’s a chance I flame out because my anxiety gets the best of me and my heart rate is too high during the final screen. That’s why I stopped doing studies for 10 years the last time. All I need to do is get to Cincinnati, not be one of the unlucky who isn’t chosen to dose, and then there’s a consistent income for 6 months with each trip back.

I haven’t been able to leave my house for 5 days. My car can’t get out of my driveway. My truck, with its precarious battery, was dead. Why haven’t I fixed the battery by now? It’s one of 20 things I could spend money on that need fixed, and until I absolutely needed to drive the truck, why spend it back then? Did we get more snow in 2 days than has snowed in 8 years? Oops. Now I’m underprepared, again.

The truck is currently, hopefully, being charged, and will retain that charge long enough to drive into town and get a battery that will eat up approximately 25% of my current capital. Then I’ll get some food; sandwich stuff, potatoes, and sausage are the usuasl. This is provided I can navigate the tundra road that is my rural neighborhood. I’ll try not to think about how my truck costs 3 times what it does to drive my car. I’ll almost certainly have to drive the truck to both Chicago and Cincinnati.

My best case scenario is that I’m filed this week, granted access to the study next week, taken to be as poor as I am by the treasurer's office, and in 3 months I’ve paid back my dad, fixed my water, and caught up on other bills related to my credentialing, insurance, and remaining credit card.

In the story my life seems hellbent on trapping me within, I continue to get “Weeeelll, we were talking” hiccups to getting my paperwork filed. I psych myself out of the study, or am not picked at all, making a mockery at that point of whatever I managed to do to reign in my anxiety and heart rate. I’m unable to get my car out for weeks leaving me to be potentially door dashing in a truck. When it’s time for the hearing, I get picked apart or delayed because they want to exercise every "fuck you" move they can. In the meantime I’m trying not to make “too much” money that makes them more powerful. I’m arguing with myself if I can or should try to go to the next show. And that plays out for months until I’m forced into Chapter 13.

I have to refrain from sliding out on what I’m hearing is large amounts of black ice and overturned semis, from what I’ve experienced, as generally negligent road clearing efforts. I have to spend most of my time in between the drives and decision-making from on high in my very cold poorly insulated home that hasn’t had running water for over a month. I get to smell bad for longer because I was showering at Planet Fitness before dashing. Those are 45 minutes away not in snow and ice, mind you.

Moving out here altogether used to be my bare minimum. I’ve been able to go to shows because “the basics” were well enough in place. Now? It feels like my home is not living up to what I need. I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older and less resilient. I don’t know if I’m just opening up to more liabilities as I struggle to keep things maintained when they all want to break at once. I don’t know if I’m just tired of fighting the backdrop of constant attack. I can’t get left alone. I’m never “good enough” to just ride my little corner of the world.

I want the decisions already. I want to know what it is I have to navigate. I work quickly because I hate ambiguity for its own sake. I hate feeling dependent on forces and people I can’t respect nor would ever carry myself like.

It’s hard to play your instruments when you can’t feel your fingers. It’s hard to wood work when you’re hotboxing dust. It’s hard to yoga, or sew, or whore bathe. So I sit, write, make tiktoks now, and wait until I get little bursts to get up and pee, eat, or fuck with the 10-steps between me and starting the real also-complicated, also-annoying process. I still have to go check on the battery. What happens if I can’t get it to start? Which of my neighbors do you think wants to cart my stank ass into town? My friend that lives in town is in Florida for 3 months dealing with problems that make mine laughable. My next closest friend lives an hour away.

Can the cats go, perhaps a whole week, unattended? I think the most I’ve done is 5 days. If the power goes out and their water freezes? I can’t even sit here and think about what to say next without my foot freezing over. The cold shows me how poor my circulation is and what areas of my body are poised for arthritis like my dad and grandpa.

What do I even want to do? Nothing. The bare minimum. I want to feel, again, like there is absolutely nowhere I have to be, no one knocking, no disaster needing cleaned up, no hand reaching its way into my pocket. I want to do that for so long that the next thing I do after that registers as the best thing I’ve ever done.

But I need to get back to being broke. I need to get the bills paid a year or two in advance. I need to be the friend who’s able to buy the tickets, dinner, drinks, parking, and tickets to the next thing between sets or intermission without blinking. I need to be able to decide I have the energy to do a little bit with a hole and concrete, so let’s capitalize on the moment and not weigh the $40 in materials against the gas prices. My life needs to more consistently feel as good as it actually is. I can’t feel better or good until I’m meaningfully distanced from all of the forces I clock as wanting me under heal or dead.

I’ll then scroll through reddit and read stories, maybe true, of people pissing away, winning, or making more money in an hour than I’ve ever been in debt, ever made a year, or would even be worth if I sold everything I owned. I’ll compare my laments to the people with health struggles, ICE’s fascism, considerably more invested-in and more respectable roles and lives than I’ve managed and I’ll self-impose a “go fuck yourself” sensibility. I’ll type in circles. I’ll go back to TV. I’ll click between windows. I think it’s about time to get disappointed by the battery again.

[1245] Call Me Maybe

I think this is going to be decently self-indulgent. If that’s not the headspace you’re in, please avert your eyes. PSA: Fuck ICE. General strike now. This digression has little-to-nothing to do with those topics, even if everything, in some way, does.

I’ve never been that good at being “one of the guys.” I’ve been told since I was very young that I was a leader.  Well before I had any conception of what that meant, it worked its way into my expectations and approach to life. I’m the roommate that finds the roommates, pays the bills, and throws the party. I’m the group project presenter. I’m the one at work who gets promoted to supervisor or manager. You know how at fast food places there’s a 22 year old managing 30-50 year old rough-looking line-cooks? I was that 22 year old, dispositionally at 15, and actually at 18.

I’ve had friend groups. Every time I reflect on them, they’ve felt less and less like they should be described as such. I’ve had people I’ve spent a majority of my social time with for at least a couple year periods at a time. I haven’t spoken a word to 95% of any individual from any of those groups in at least 5, probably 10 or more years. There’s passing glances on what they may post to social media. Many stopped using it entirely. One just declared he’s exhausted by the hate on “both sides” and said to reach out individually before he deactivates. I liked the post and declined to do so.

As “mental health” became a popular buzzy thing, a lot of people started asking questions like, “Does this person serve me?” They started conceptualizing their life in terms of “needs.” The “toxic” and “gaslighting” narratives were getting examined and the locus of “power” reimagined. A lot of people, at least superficially, appeared to be waking up to the power they have and the nature of their choices. That’s, broadly, a good thing.

What was hidden in that newfound awareness was a perfect selfish self-justification narrative. When you’re concerning yourself with your needs, perhaps for the first time ever in a meaningful way, you’re not going to be open to challenge and contradiction. Probably, when it’s new, rightfully so. But once you’ve made some obvious readjustments, there’s a temptation to think the work is over. Like, once you get dunked and saved, you’re going to heaven, right? You don’t have to actually practice your faith provided you believe in earnest. Don’t get hung up on, “faith without works is dead.”

My instinct is that I’ve been Marie Kondo-ed out of many lives. It’s incredibly rare that even tipsy I’ll bother to message someone I used to hang with or call a friend. What did I serve that person back then? Maybe they laughed. Maybe they liked the party environment. Maybe we had good conversations. Maybe they liked to fuck around. But, as we grew up and priorities changed, increasingly you start to register as just a kind of annoying bag of opinions. You don’t fit the narrative of what it takes to look after a family or succeed at work. When you’re reminiscing it registers as a kind of exhausting and pathetic appeal to what no longer exists.

I’m not a trapped in the past kind of person though. I’m a student of history. I’m also deeply investigative about why right now looks and feels the ways it does. Your “past” brain and all its memories exist today, morphed every time you access them, and signaling as safe or dangerous to entertain. To the extent that I’ve caused psychic injury, it might as well have been yesterday, and I think it goes a long way to explaining the disingenuousness of reaching out or trying to “stay connected,” if we ever really were.

I also know the power of lore and gossip. I’ve been a genuinely mean or ridiculous person in the past. I’m inclined to argue against that being my default setting or indicative of my broader project bent on hurting people. I’ve got a couple acutely dramatic and damming stories that I’m certain have made their rounds and would disincline most from hearing my perspective. At one level it’s perfectly understandable. At what I think is a more important and reasonable level, it’s the precise kind of unreasonable we unironically crave and claim in service to our “joy” or “mental health.”

I’m someone who struggles to conceive of “forgiveness.” I’d rather be understood. I’d rather there exist a series of things we can both point to that show contrition, change, or evidence we’re moving towards some mutual aim. When I was younger, almost every time I was asked to apologize for something, it just conjured resentment. I wasn’t sorry. I couldn’t understand the reason to be. You want me to lie? I used to get viciously beaten for lying! Certainly as a kid, I wasn’t coming from a place of personal responsibility nor grasping the impact of my words or actions. Apologize? But YOU MADE ME!

I’ve heard it said that forgiveness is about you more than the other person. If you can forgive, you drop the weight of that resentment and judgment. This selfless act regarded as the pinnacle of Christ’s love is actually a selfish tool to let yourself off the hook in learning how to cope and conceptualize your pain. You can adopt that methodology an infinite amount of times, sacrificing as many relationships, narratives, or responsibilities as it takes to feel like your needs are finally being serviced.

I’m an antagonist. If I were the villain in a story, I would be regarded “simply” as the necessary component to a compelling tale. No one is cracking open a book to read hundreds of pages about people just hanging out and living their lives without conflict. They have to conquer the monsters. They have to overcome the dramatic tragedy. They have to forge a new identity and unlock powers they never knew they had.

I’m not a monster. I am, but it’s a capacity, not a hard and fast sole and coherent designation. I’m not a monster because you say so or because you can point a finger. I’m not a monster because of the pain I’ve caused and will take responsibility for. I’m a monster because I’m not actually “human” or “a friend” in the mind of most people first.

I find this ironic because we’re living in some catastrophic fascist times where people I’m more inclined to understand as “animals” or “as monster as it gets” are shooting people in the back and face. There are people murdering us in the street, kidnapping children, and lying for millions of dollars and more license to destroy literally everything that made our society what it was.

Would it be overstating it to say that I’ve felt a kind of coldness and anger that’s been more consistent and resolute than I’ve ever heard former friends or partners voice about what’s been happening over the last 10 years? I don’t think so, and that feels properly insane to say, but I don’t feel like I’m lying. Is that not more evidence of my actually monstrous and conceited nature?

I work in counseling. I’ve worked for DCS. I’ve been a general case manager and social worker. I’ve worked in prison. I’ve been face to face with people for years who have fucked up in ways you can’t imagine for yourself. They have been fucked by details that don’t show up in the most dramatic of TV shows or movies. None of them feel like monsters. None of them feel like people it’s not worth talking to or teaching. None of them feel beyond the capacity to be redeemed, so to speak, even if it’s unclear or unlikely the confluence of core wounds will actually resolve.

My professional life has added considerably to my understanding of how and whether people actually practice their humanity. It’s not clear to me most people are inclined to treat each other as real human people. For the longest time I wanted to personalize that. Blame my argumentative and explanatory style as “too much.” But while that can certainly be annoying and tuned up or down, what’s happening first is people want to be appeased and agreed with, regardless of what they’re doing or saying. Your value is directly proportional to their internal calculation of your capacity to do that.

Doesn’t that sound like the instinctual unarticulated practice of asking out loud whether something serves you or brings you joy? Does it look like we’ve just repackaged our animal nature into something that sounds more polite and professional?

I think there’s a direct line through the alienation I’ve experienced to the sense of helplessness about what’s happening culturally. I think people’s inability to truthfully discuss the painful details and work within the practical confines of what it means to do something meaningful is why they can only increase in their suffering of that condition. You get cancer, you say, “Thinking about this sickness doesn’t serve me.” You jettison the thought. The cancer grows regardless.

It’s not true to say that I want people who were friends to be friendly again. The truth is that I want people who I thought I saw evidence of what they were or what we were together to see the same thing I did. That’s a very different kind of longing or desire. I don’t just want to be accepted or tolerated. I don’t want to wear you down or conjure pity. I want you to feel the same kind of patience, affinity, respect, and hope that I have in working with people in earnest. I want you to be as discerning in your decision to never talk to me again, where the conditions for that to be true rise beyond gossip or incidentally hurt feelings.

I cut my mom off, for example, because 30 seconds into any conversation you’re transported into a world of mental illness, racism, religious dogma, and victimhood that’s beyond parody. I’m regularly setting the example of patient parsing and question asking. I’m making choices. She’s rabidly barking. It’s bizarre to be treated with the same tool or like we’re the same kind of bad thing. It’s, thankfully, hard to feel like you’ve been iced out when you start to recognize that you were maybe never seen in the first place.

I then wonder about how deep or whether it’s always been true that “things” or “culture” has been so superficial. I watch my dad seemingly pretty regularly interact with friends he grew up with on facebook or sometimes they’ll show up to a funeral. If I died tomorrow, I don’t know that I’d get to 20 people outside of immediate family. I cared too little? Fought over the wrong things? Crossed the line too many times? I’m not pitying myself, I’m seriously curious. And I kinda think I’m going to go the rest of my life never getting the answers.

[1244] Lord And Savor

There is an infinite list of things I do not understand. If we’re to narrow that down at all, they often have to do with “the human condition.” I want to avoid too many empty and sweeping cliches. It simply doesn’t matter to me to say what we “could” be or belabor the depth of our atrocities. I might be trying to invent a concept for myself on the fly, so for now let’s call it “the loop.”

When people yearn for revolution, I don’t think they necessarily believe themselves to be going in a circle. Overthrow the powers that be! The problem, it’s assumed, could never be that now you’re in power and there’s something intrinsically worth being suspicious about its nature.

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

As an, alleged, individual, I think about the power of my feelings. I think about how for years I rode the energy of resentment and revenge. I delighted in the idea of who or what I could destroy, either materially or intellectually. It was a regular occurrence that I might make someone cry, and no part of me felt bad. What? I was just talking. All I did was use my capacity to see through the bullshit, locate your pain, and bring it into view for all to see.

You do things like that when your conscience is clear. I wasn’t evil. I wasn’t hateful. I was right. Moreover, I was making things better because I was wielding the weapon of truth. When you were either forced to do the same, or suffer the consequences of not doing so, I remained absolved of responsibility because the higher-order thing we all need was just doing its thing. That’s the nature of truth; it hurts.

I made no distinction between my subjective experience and “the truth.” I had no appreciation nor awareness of how my feelings might be coloring that truth. I was either basically dead inside, suppressed by years of emotional trauma, or confident in my activated capacity for anger over perceived injustice or silliness. My unarticulated assumptions gave me license to bull my way through many a china shop.

I’m still that person, but old. I’m more curious. I’m tired. I’m not the kind of tired that you hear from normal people who can’t be bothered to do “more” or “extra” than they do on any given day. I’m tired of seeing the same story. I’m tired of my own words. I’m tired of perceiving the loops. I’m tired of waiting for the revolution to arrive at a place where anyone acts like they’re capable of making decisions.

That was a key underlying insight about the nature of my power. It’s one that people pick up on and use to beat me over the head with how much is my fault. The parties in college, for the hundreds of people in and out of our house over years, fell to me. Was it “our” house? I organized it. I built things for it. I bought the booze. Greenlit the friend groups. Assigned roles. It was crazy how quickly people fell in line. If you got too drunk? I got you too drunk. If you had a questionable sexual encounter, surely we all know I raped you.

I’m used to being the excuse. It’s an outgrowth of me realizing my ability to choose in a more deliberate and conscious way than other people adopt for themselves. Their choices show up when…well, that’s the question, isn’t it? When do they choose? I don’t really know. I don’t, honestly, conceive of most people making real choices most of the time. I see people as animals first. When the automatic food dispenser drops, they run over. Were they even hungry? Have they ever known real hunger?

If you were starving, you might choose to kill for it, and, circumstances providing, anyone looking from afar might have a hard time blaming you. You might have the perfect excuse. Maybe the food is going to your young child. Maybe you just earnestly worked for days to get your hands on a previous morsel, and it was stolen before you could bite. Maybe you’re the last person alive with the blood that’s going to save the world if you can only get to the secret mountain bunker.

How fantastical of a tale do we need to rest within our excuses? I don’t think most people need more than an empty sentiment like, “I’m a Christian.” I don’t think most people need to do anything beyond point to objects they own of status or only need to tell you about ways they’ve suffered. The loop, the ritual, of invoking your excuse and then carrying on with business as usual is baked in. You deserve it. They deserve it. If you weren’t so dishonest, you could see the truth too. You could share in the dignity and pride of my perspective. You could atone for your sin.

I can feel myself when I’m begging for an excuse. Whether it’s to flip out or pick the naughtiest words. I know when I want to ride the righteous lightening of condemnation. I know when I want attention. I know when I want to get something for less than I hope to put into it. The superficial engagement of social media highlights it. The woe-is-me spirals of anxiety over what I consistently and explicitly call “not real problems.” I know how quickly the wheel turns. I know I’m hurrying up to slow down. I know it’s because I don’t fundamentally trust the impact and results of my choices anymore.

My old superpower was genuine belief. I was a level of naive that has probably had hundreds of people going out of their way to ensure I wouldn’t die prematurely. I’m not, “Sure, let’s hop in your van” kind of naive (true story), but I believed things made sense. I believed families love each other. I believed businesses hired and rewarded the best workers. I believed school challenged and emboldened. I thought friendships, when based on a kind of psychopathic approach to truth and accounting, could last forever. I thought I could think or argue my way in or out of anything. I thought I wouldn’t get “a version” of the things I was aiming for, but precisely what I was after. I had previously only ever been after extremely simple and superficial things.

Now I realize I’ve potentially been in something of a years-long crisis. I lost the plot. It was a story that might’ve only been a rough draft of what you’d need as a, hopefully unironically, “higher” functioning adult. I didn’t pick new or better goals. I didn’t search for what an evolved well of infinite motivation may look like when it’s not fueled by “fuck you” energy. Me, allegedly, so capable of responsibility and actually making choices, lost at sea?

I’m bored, but not because I don’t have things to do or because there isn’t a perpetual five-alarm fascist fire to put out. I’m bored of spirit. I’m bored waiting for something to happen as a result of choices instead of reactions. I can’t choose for you. I can’t invest of myself what you can’t realize. We weren’t partying together, I guess. We weren’t dreaming about the future we could create. We aren’t even able to talk about “the world” with the same level of awareness.

I feel like I choose to mock myself and my feelings by looking for things that challenge my perspective. I don’t care how I feel. It’s wrong. It’s incomplete and ill-informed. It’s automatic and antagonistic. I don’t “need” to feel “good” or “happy.” I don’t describe myself in terms of “needs” too often that don’t rest in things like eating or shitting. What “I need” is “us choosing.” I think implicit in that is me getting chosen in return.

I don’t feel chosen by anyone but my dad. I feel supported by friends, but certainly not chosen. I feel like their support often stems from places where they feel broken. It’s where I then have to be extremely careful that I’m not taking advantage and holding myself personally responsible for trying to square when it feels imbalanced. When I can’t simplify things in monetary ways, I get disoriented. Traditionally, I’m the free therapist-friend providing years of open-ended feedback, looping in and out of what they may “need” from me.

Do they know what they need anymore than I do? One thinks they need mushrooms. Another thinks they need less sex. Another thinks softball matters more than voting. I’ve watched from afar as friends choose their vocation, their equivocations, and their artfully crafted stories and reels celebrating their families. Just like I’m choosing to do TikToks and garner hatred from reddit.

To be sure, I’m meandering through the debased means of connection in a bid for the wrong kind of attention. I’m maintaining my status as a curiosity or piece of safe drama to watch, like a TV show you don’t care for but can’t look away. If the show gets out of line and asks you to really pay attention or start choosing your own adventure, can you imagine a greater betrayal? I’m yours to watch. None of this fourth-wall breaking bullshit.

I’m tired of waiting for you. I’m tired of hoping I’ll feel better or less anxious in the wake of something you finally figure out. I work myself up because I feel like, ultimately, it really does all depend on me. You won’t join me, but you’ll do what I say. You won’t shoulder the risk, but you’ll dump the resources. You won’t access the vulnerable disorienting nature of your power, but you’ll bask in mine. I don’t want that. I don’t know that it’s possible to get what I want instead.

No one sincerely doubts me. That’s part of the mythology. No one who has watched how I work or interact with the world thinks that, if I set my mind to it, I won’t get it. What they’re clocking is the exact thing about me that made so many people cry. I, like any other boring pathological megalomaniac, see your weakness. It’s the same as my weakness. It’s what we’re telegraphing when we’re not making choices. It’s our insecurities. It’s our cliches. It’s our desire to downplay and dismiss the catastrophic nature of our environment.

I live in a fucking shed. I love my shed, but I live in a fucking shed because I was born into a context that was cooking modern fascism. My shed used to represent freedom and possibility. It increasingly represents things to repair and clean up. It grows in its identity as a lonely white-trash island with each passing year. It has all my stuff that I haphazardly engage with. It has my cats which, I don’t exactly want eaten by coyotes, but I don’t want to have to think about if I leave for a week or what they cost me in vet visits.

It took 8 years, a divorce, and a friend moving back to this miserable state to find a consistent concert buddy. At least 10 people I used to party with several times a week for years live like an hour or 2 away. Who in their right mind would choose to shoot the shit over dinner or a beer even once a year? What former coworker would choose to share their new job stories or scuttlebutt after I left? It’s unthinkable.

The irony is such that “my power” isn’t mine at all. I can only tap into what feels like “choice space” to “break loops” in weird little pockets of acute awareness or frustration. I can reign in the feelings and chart a course of action when I seemingly align two oppositely charged magnetic tips and push back against the forces that are otherwise sending me for a loop. I can line them up whenever I want. I can disregard the waves. My mind need not shake. But I’ll still be the only one pointing and pushing towards…whatever it is I’m bothering.

I chose shed because at least the nature of its constraints felt closer to a place of true and actual choices than I otherwise tend to observe from people. I have very little external pressure to do anything out here. It’s all manifest evidence of my hairbrained ideas, effort, and in-processing. It’s a sanctuary where I’m not expected to perform. I’m not failing to live up to your needs out here. I can’t reasonably expect you to visit.

I don’t know what kind of example I want to set anymore. Demonstrating a degree of financial “freedom” has meant nothing. Efforts to salvage, create, or sustain garner 2 or 3 likes occasionally. Every job I ever get aggressively chases me away literally moments away from positive feedback and accolades. I’m funny, but never wanted to be “the funny guy.” I’m angry, but in this era every outburst is performative by default. I've been too big a whore to fall in with incels and worked too long in social work to self-pity.

I have this sickening sense that, somehow, everyone is watching what I choose, but not in an effort to actually see.

[1243] Trust And Reconciliation

I don't think this is going to help. I think I've done about as good as I can do to mitigate my problem. I would love to not stay stuck in an anxiety spiral for the next several weeks. The immediacy of my feelings part of me is already bored and annoyed-enough with them, but I can't seem to dismiss them entirely. This still feels like the ambiguous beginning of what might be the meaningful steps that get me out of debt.

I hate debt. I hate it so much. Out of extreme luck I never had to take on school debt, and that's if you don't ask my dad who almost died and had to fight for years to get the settlement money that paid for college. My former best friend and I calculated to the penny what either of us owed in fast food buys. I didn't apply for a credit card until my 30s. The first time I borrowed around $2,000 to pay off my shed-now-house, I worked 18-20 hour days delivering food, donated plasma, and ate the cheapest ways I could to pay it back in 3 weeks.

I've only gone into debt because I've believed in myself, the people around me, and what I could accomplish. I've anchored to the fact that I've never gone in debt an amount higher than what's been stolen from me. Both my uncles, and my former friend, account for that. I've hired people who have stolen from me. Others who have, functionally, stolen from me in their unreliability and perhaps outright lies about what they could accomplish in grant-writing and fundraising. At a certain point while working two jobs, both stole wages from me.

This is the context. I didn't get myself in trouble because I don't know math or refuse to keep a budget. I love excel sheets and formulas showing me what is or isn't reasonable with theoretical conditions. I didn't blow money on hookers and cocaine. I don't owe for gambling. I don't drive a car I can't afford nor live in a house with obscene rent or mortgage payments that no psychology major delivery boy should ever expect to afford. I'm not behind or avoiding paying for children I don't have, or a divorce. I'm just an average poor-enough person who's managed to sneak in a few nice things over the years.

I'm up against, what I'm told, is a county trustee who likes to go out of her way to make Chapter 7 filings contentious. In a worst case scenario, I'm backed into a corner of filing Chapter 13 instead, which fundamentally protects my shit, but drags out the payment process over 3 to 5 years. I already thought I had a solid consistent payment with a debt consolidation company, and that proved to be untrue. It's why I'm in this bankruptcy exploration altogether. It's a doable, manageable, failsafe and fallback position. But it doesn't correct for the fundamental antagonizing psychological condition.

I deeply resent that I owe anyone for anything. I don't live in a catastrophically exuberant and excessive way. I've never tried to delude myself about what I can or can't afford. This isn't chickens coming home to roost. This isn't karmic justice for some Ponzi scheme. This is the latest step in a series of humiliating conversations I've had to engage in with the people closest to me that have supported me financially over the years. I have irons in the fire for paying them back, and in relatively short order, but I maintain that neither them, nor I, should have ever been put in this position in the first place.

And that indignity is at the core of what nags me even if I get a "solution" through the longer-form bankruptcy. I won't be "free" to "just be broke" and go back to navigating my few hundred to a thousand dollars a month at a time. I'll be on the hook every month for the next 3 to 5 years, and punished if I try to pay it sooner. I'll be at the mercy of the legacy of betrayal. I'll be there until I can find a soothing enough coping story about why it's small potatoes in the face of the world otherwise burning down or atrocity next door. I'll be there because a small-town trustee gets her rocks off adding insult to injury like so many that have been emboldened in our fascist era. It feels like I'm begging the universe to just let me get back to zero.

In a best case scenario, all of the information I've dug up for the filing, and the evaluation I got from a realtor, will just allow things to proceed without a fight or delay, and in 3 months, I'm still broke, but free. There's a small chance I don't psych myself out and get screened away from a drug study that's supposed to start the first week of February. In a magic land of hope and possibility, I get a clean filing, admitted to the study, and every couple weeks I'm getting $1,000 for each outpatient visit which I can use to pay back my dad and past investments from friends, as well as get back ahead on normal house bills. I might even get my water running again.

Then, months from now, I get to read this blog as just another piece of spot-panic that would have benefited immensely from hindsight it's impossible to manifest any sooner. Then, this is one more gripe in the infinite series of injustices I no-less navigate one way or another regardless of the anticipated pain or suffering. I want to be the kind of person that already knows this. I want to be at peace now, not when the questions get answered. The fundamental question remains. Why can't I just be cool, now? I already know everything. Didn't you see me type it all up without notes or study? Can't you pick a crisis from my previous 1,242 entries I survived or forgot about? Fucking learn your lesson already you neurotic dick head. You don't have real problems, and no one fucking cares. You don't have to either.

[1242] Know Stupid Questions

Why do you ask, “Why?”

It’s my understanding that most of the time you only ask “why” when you already know the answer. The second most common reason is that you explicitly don’t want to know the answer.

Why would God…? Why do birds suddenly appear…? Why doesn’t Congress…? Why am I alone…? Why didn’t my parents…? Why doesn’t the school…? Why are they so angry at…? Why would you downvote...?

“Why” doesn’t invoke intelligence. “Why” doesn’t necessitate context or history. “Why” works mostly in service to filling dead air. “Why” is what you use to gauge whether or not your “whys” are more “reasonable” and “righteous” than someone else’s.

I know why. I know why in almost every single scenario because I’m just another animal. I have the same words as you, if we’re speaking in English. I have about the same kind of traumas. I’ve got approximately the same experiences and familiarity with media or era-specific references. Yes, we’re all unique and have differences, but are overwhelmingly the same across the most important metrics for answering different “why” questions.

We fell under a spell when we got comfortable. When “we” no longer had to witness the infinite list of consequences for where we are weak, we started to believe “I” am special. “I” got myself fed and clothed, put myself through school, picked the right job, partner, and place to grow up. “I” am so smart, talented, funny, and aware that if only “you” or “them” behaved like me, we’d all be happy, rich, and morally just.

When you’re environment is often killing you or your young, you spend considerably more time thinking about “us” and how we can all help each other. When you have nothing to worry about but the running narrative in your head informed or deluded by whatever streams of information were introduced, things take a turn.

Why? Because of “me” and “my.” You already knew the answer. Why? The obvious consequences of what you and yours are doing. You explicitly don’t want to know the answer.

For as long as we’re animals, you can blame things on fear, ignorance, fallacies and illogic. You can describe the contexts and histories indefinitely. You can play up the biology, psychology, and sociology. None of them are the real answer. The real answer implicates what separates us from mere animals. The real answer is a conscience that nags or justifies or self-immolates.

You have a choice. There’s your why. You have a choice to respond or be silent. You have a choice to watch or look away. You have a choice to call out a lie, or play along. You have a choice to subscribe to unrepentant propaganda and hate. You have a choice to join the club, wear the camo, shoot the beer, and model behavior for the next arbitrary angry shooter in the next school.

Why? You chose this. This is the conservative finger wag. Make better choices! Just comply! As with all true conservatives, there’s no capacity for irony. They pretend the choice exists where it doesn’t. They deny, because then they’d have to live with themselves, the choices to look away at the chaos they foment. They vote for it. Then the “disengaged” and “disenfranchised” cosign it. Then the rest of the world gets to think 2/3rds of the country are beyond parody in their fascist expression.

Why? We choose to organize 10, 20, or 30 years behind. We choose to stop creating work-arounds until things get desperate. We choose to respond to calls for action with pithy online commentary about how it won’t work, we don’t have time, we don’t know enough, or how it’s not really our problem, we’re just concerned and exercising our voice.

It happened again today. I came across a meme a friend of mine posted about wanting to create a little farm. My comment, “You could start that literally tomorrow if you want to come out here.” Don’t you know? It’s too far from family and friends. I live 10 minutes away from the prison we both worked at and drove to every day. Does she actually want to start a farm? No. She wants an escape from the hellscape that is being terminally online and aware enough of how properly fucked things around the world are. We live in Indiana, getting data centers rammed down our throats and tripled electric bills. She’s gay, and the christian fascists in charge likely dream about how they could harm her.

Why do we reduce ourselves to memes and dreams? Why aren’t we meeting regularly to discuss who is or isn’t working to fight back? Why aren’t we consciously creating community around shared values and instead reflexively dismissing even entertaining a discussion about what it practically takes to move in the direction that feels better and worthwhile? We’re choosing it. We’re choosing our little silos and to like, almost never share, occasionally. We’re choosing empty outrage and personal exhaustion. We’re choosing to let the worst feelings win in every moment of every day, and especially when we’re acting hardest like they aren’t winning.

Until we respect the nature of choice, I do not believe we will robustly and sincerely fix anything. People chose joining ICE. They didn’t necessarily choose the circumstances that led to their finances feeling like they needed the insanely high paycheck. I don’t need to know anything about any given modern Nazi ICE agent to imagine their sick mom or chronic issue they can’t afford healthcare for. Doesn’t justify shit, the context and thought exercise alone can have you seeing red. Their excuse-ridden “why” means nothing to you! All you know is your “why” for virulent rejection.

Do not confuse my digression or position. I’m far more radical and violent in how I think things should be handled. My grandpa slit Nazi throats, and I’ve been trying to celebrate that several times a day recently.

Why doesn’t the politician…? Why don’t the people who control reddit, google, facebook, x…? Why can’t we just listen to…? Why does it always have to…?

We’re not together. We don’t share. We don’t even try. We choose personal quiet lonely screaming. We choose exhaustion. We choose, “It’s too hard, it will take too long, and I just can’t.” We choose our words lazily. We choose to keep ourselves distracted or enmeshed in a story that “things” are what they are. We choose to lie, and then we wind up to swing at the gross reflection with all of our hollow fists. Why? A book of reasons would draw you closer to engaging a problem. A book of excuses drives you away.

I’ve sincerely offered a free spot on my land to everyone I know since I bought it. I put up with an emotionally tumultuous relationship for over year with the one person I’ve tried to run the “build stuff together” program with. It didn’t make me want communion and shared goals any less. It didn’t make me think either of us would be worse off if we better learned how to communicate and navigate difficult feelings together. It doesn’t make me root any less for her and whatever she’s doing in life.

Why? Because I know what I want, generally, out of myself and for the people around me. I know how important it was to see the right examples and how they worked in my life against the worst things happening to me. I know how much good will has been extended to me, and continues to be, and how that contributes to a genuine picture of what things could actually be. I chose this, and continue to choose it every day. I choose to situate the things I have to learn and deal with against the bigger picture and what I want that’s going to take more than what I already know. I already know why.

[1241] Cut It Out

My brain has been packed. I’ll be lucky to put a paragraph together for what feels like a dozen different subjects. My head no less compiling and looking for the patterns.

They killed an average, normal, sparkling white woman. Just now. Just NOW people are arriving at, “It could be me!” Not people who pay attention. Not people who read history. The people who can’t be bothered or can’t handle what it takes to be enmeshed in the political landscape. And who can blame them? It’s one impossible, unprecedented, and seemingly intractable problem after the next every single day. They’ve already killed innocent Americans. They’ve been Nazis all along.

We fought world wars over this shit. It wasn’t that long ago. My grandpa killed Nazis. We established a world order to try and avoid ending up like 100 million people who had to die because hatred and a desire for power ran amok. I’ve been asking for years, how bad does it need to get? How many people have to die for the worst reasons imaginable before we’re back at some iteration of a world war footing? How many lies are we not going to call lies? How often are we gonna play the “both sides” game? How many criminals are we going to pardon and reward?

At a certain point, you have to stop blaming “the algorithm” and recognize the nature of the manipulation. There’s not a single sentence on my feed that isn’t highlighted if not for its capacity to sound like the craziest thing anyone has ever said about what would otherwise be shared reality. If it’s a picture of a red square, the first comment with 1,500 “likes” says something like, “You’re ignoring Green squares because you know Jews deserve what they get.” What? Doesn’t matter, must be “refuted” and batted around indefinitely for engagement.

Increasingly, it feels like “the culture war” is literally addiction. It’s one of the reasons I struggle with the idea of calling addiction a “disease.” I get the argument in the broadest stretch of the word and what you can measure between some addictive brains versus not. But all things being equal, if I was sitting here with cancer, I can’t choose to recognize that cancer in any other way than as the thing that’s going to eventually kill me if I don’t correctly identify and eradicate it. The angry and hateful/irrational/bot-driven words can’t eat you if you don’t let them.

Nor do any series of “crazy,” “gaslighting,” or “powerfully framed rhetoric.” I’m so utterly confused by people who can’t see through words that are expressly meant to radicalize. I can’t tell you how many parrots I hear pretending to “argue” things they explicitly learn nothing about in service to their mouthpiece act. I don’t care how many times the lie is told, it’s not persuasive to someone like me. It’s not compelling. It’s not something I’m eager to repeat. But that’s only because I care about the distinction between the truth and a lie.

Why? Why do I care about that distinction? Lying makes you money. Lying gives you so much power you can kill by the thousands and face no real consequences. Lying makes you famous. Lying helps you fit in. It’s a one-stop shop of solutions to the biggest problems we face as lonely desperate animals. So, again, why? Why not play along? What’s it matter to you?

It’s a selfish impulse I have. If I felt as good lying as I do living truthfully, maybe I’d be able to lie like them. I like being able to see through lies. I like being able to accurately predict what’s going to happen. I like the result of consistent work and building upon a foundation I don’t have to worry when everything around it is burning down. Most of the most stressful and ridiculous things I have to navigate personally and professionally boil down to lying. Whatever the person, or organization thinks is being protected by doing so is the same naive pretense that puts the smug condescending tone behind the vitriol of those in power now.

I don’t think anyone is genuinely afraid of, “What goes around, comes around.” Plenty of Nazis didn’t get tried at The Hague. Plenty of people spend a large portion of their day carrying out physical and verbal abuses towards vulnerable people and animals they’ll also claim to love. Occasionally, someone bites back, but most cower, defeated, praying the person will get theirs in Hell. Or, and I think this is key, they don’t want them to end up in Hell; they’re so nice and so forgiving it becomes a kind of noble self-delusion to suffer indefinitely and perhaps even think you deserve it.

Is that where we are as a species? We deserve this? I’ve certainly felt that. We’ve neglected so much for so long. We’ve stopped caring, at all, about the big picture or about the obvious consequences. We stopped insisting on the rules that literally a hundred million people had to die to get established.

I’ve started TikToking. It’s a desperate act. It’s not a performance. I’m not a “content creator,” nor “influencer.” I’m not trying to make “reaction” videos. I’m not trying to speak from some kind of righteous indignant authority beyond the place of common sense and experiences I genuinely feel. I’m not a comedian. I’m not a philosopher. I’m trying to scream more into the world in the way that the 60% of Americans who can’t read at a 6th grade level might understand. I know they aren’t reading blog posts.

Anyone and anything has the potential to break through like a bullet through a suburban mom’s windshield. “We” have an infinitely better chance of breaking things through by exercising our voices. You have to be real. You have to state the obvious so many times that we work it back into our collective memory and behavior. I don’t need another world war to have learned many lessons from it. Masked private police with SS tattoos is a non-starter. 85-ish years ago my grandfather would have, literally, slit that person’s throat. My job might be to find the non-violent means of rendering the same result, but it’s also to keep saying, proudly, what my grandpa accomplished.

These big problems make small problems feel so… misplaced? Misaligned? Whether it’s my difficulty doing menial jobs, broken water, itchy toes, debt, or concerns about my car or house, it’s like, didn’t the Vice President just say they’re gonna go door-to-door? So they’re gonna shoot people in their own homes because there will be more stuffed animals to spray blood on? Because this keeps us safe? I’m, it must be “impressed,” that the collective hasn’t started shooting back. It’s an incredible amount of strength and resilience. The Nazis never gave up, and the Japanese only broke when the most dangerous thing ever invented was dropped on them twice.

Resolve goes both ways. It just feels like we need to speed things along. We need consequences faster than fascism operates. We need people who are criminally exercising their power punished here and now, not, “When we get power, hopefully, one day.” We should be stripping Supreme Court judges of their positions. We should be investigating people who slow-walked insurrection activity. We should be imprisoning people who have destroyed our institutions in service to their greed and conspiracies. And we should be doing it today, tomorrow, and every single day until we can breathe again.

Every single time you’re drawn into a “debate” over things we figured out as pre-humans, they win. Just don’t. Just don’t respond. Don’t bother. Don’t feed the trolls and bots. Identify an action move, like with Stacey Abrams’ podcast, and do something suggested there. Write. Do this. Explain, in detail, how you’re not crazy and things you observe are wrong or right for thoughtful reasons. Identify the people who are playing the wrong game. The liars. The gamesmen. The ones who shift and play to the rabble in their bid for the kind of power other fascists believe is worthwhile and sustainable. That’s the “only” way out. Literally every one of us doing the smallest bit, every day, in service to each other, not the errant barking of the puppy killers, convicted rapists, and proud.

[1240] Make Myself Believe

I want to state for the record, and for future me, I’m perfectly aware that I’m in some form of a “panic hole.” I’ve never used that term before, and I suspect my version of “panic” looks many degrees more muted and boring than average. I’m invoking the concept because of what I’ve observed in my behavior over the last two weeks.

I think it started when I got surprised by what was a miscommunication in what my sober-living house business partner expected to be paid. We’d previously split everything equally. She needed to pay back some family that got the house into the condition it was for move-in ready. I eagerly agreed to the amount she asked for. I thought, incorrectly, it was an amount that included the bills. I learned from a text requesting the money otherwise a couple weeks later. Now, instead of having enough money to basically cover my bills each month, I’m underwater in what’s left to split.

Moreover, I’ve been the primary force for ensuring the house is even remotely coherent, legal, and stable. I’ve evicted the people who couldn’t hack it, in the middle of the night, twice. I’ve packed and moved their shit. I’ve drawn up and gotten the contracts signed. I’ve done outreach looking for more referrals. I’ve picked up furniture, installed cameras, and otherwise navigated house logistics. We would not have a house had I not put together the spreadsheet and made the argument to the house owner partner. I’m still working on what it would take to get our next house.

Selfishly, spiritually, I understand wanting to make as much money as you can off of your assets. I understand, deeply, viciously, the desire to pay back what you owe and not being beholden to what someone has done for you. I would have more sympathy for this position were she keen to show up to group meetings, explain the responsibilities she’s willing to take over with her increased wealth, and acknowledge that there would be no “business” part of this arrangement, or any money to take from, were it not for me.

As with everything, I just have to sit around and wait. I can put together the numbers, ask the questions, and earnestly try to build something profitable and sustainable, and yet always be at the mercy of someone else. My effort won’t be appreciated or recognized, and I have to be careful I don’t threaten what I’m allowed to keep. Yes, there’s paperwork, but who wants to pay lawyers when you’re trying to make money or like and respect the people you’re working with? This frustrating and disorienting stage gets set.

Then, a few days later, I get something of a demand letter from Chase. Dutifully, I sent it to my debt consolidation company, as I’ve sent them every piece of outreach from the three companies involved in my debt consolidation plan for the last fifteen months. I learn that my monthly payment could more than double in order to appease and “resolve” my account. For the first year, all I ever needed to do was come up with $416 a month. That paid all my house bills, plus the consolidation. I was assured the accounts would all find their resolution in 3–6 months. That did not happen.

Now, I’ve started to make it my mission to get out of debt. When I’m not in debt, I need to make about $300 a month to stay afloat. I’ve made $150, gross, from Door Dashing the last 2 days. That snapshot is the picture of my life I’m trying to return to. The journey is through, let’s just say, $20,000 of debt. So much of that is predatory interest and fees, not what I racked up, and that’s not counting what I think is $7,000 in payments made already.

I’m constantly trying to land on math that doesn’t make my head explode. I have an old work van that should be worth at least $5,000 I’m trying to sell. I have a car trailer worth at least $1,000. I’ve got a friend doing her budget to see how she might buy a chunk of my land. I have a box truck I don’t know what it’s worth, but I’m told there’s a certain kind of person who likes those boxes or frames on which they can put their own. There’s a drug study in Cincinnati that’s only 4 days with 11 outpatient visits that would net $8,800. I was, stupidly, anticipating getting a new job that would gross about $2,200 a month. I was going to continue dashing after work, and pursuing whatever I could sell.

It looks like so much potential, no? It feels like I can say something like, “By the numbers, this makes sense, and it shouldn’t take that long or be that hard.” Then, the emails. Your car insurance is due. Your credential renewal fees are coming. I haven’t washed dishes or been able to flush my toilet for over a month as my well pump died. I can’t afford the pump or labor, so in comes my dad to rescue me. Let’s owe $650 there now. Let’s think about the money your friend donated to allow you to counsel clients for free and try to jumpstart your business. You certainly will feel forever on the hook there until you turn yourself into an investment that starts paying her back. Are any of these people nagging you, begging you, resenting you, etc. about the money? Absolutely not. They don’t have to.

I tend to meet the immediacy of panic with action. That’s good when it can ground you. It’s dangerous when your brain is on fire and you’re driving the latest messy or frustrating order, cursing yourself severely about getting a college degree so you could be driving a salvaged car from Chick-fil-A to a rich person’s house who doesn’t tip.

I tell people all the time how angry I am. The most persistent feedback I get is, “I don’t believe you.” They aren’t around for screaming myself hoarse at the cunt riding my ass. They aren’t watching me flirt with death as I take metal rods to the face, fumbling around in the dark on my land, looking for a special tool I need to service my well under the delusion that I can do it myself with enough YouTube and AI. I can get to a point, then I need the $100 tool, then the $400 tool, then the patience to yell at AI to focus back up.

I’m so disoriented I tried to post to TikTok. In the furthest reaches of my arbitrary dreams-of-a-fix mind I think, “Why can’t I go viral?” I’m still pretty cute. I make people laugh regularly. All that superficial shit like hard nips will get people to click and then my quippy sentiments or deadpan or whatever it is can get some attention, and then like BetterHelp or Quintz or some shit will want to put a logo in the corner and I’ll be back in shape in no time! Maybe a Band-Aid company will want to sponsor covering up what the pole did to my nose!

I upload my first video. It’s a, and this is crucial, genuinely sincere statement about being tired of being poor. I’m driving. I qualify it, “Not poor poor, but poor enough.” I avoid the annoying things I don’t like seeing in videos. It’s a perfect throwaway micro-attention piece of bullshit that could get passed around or remixed and applied elsewhere. It was almost a little sing-songy. I open it up a few minutes later to check on any views.

Removed for “original sound.”

Hello? God? Is that You? Do I have to believe now? Your boy is too dumb and old to even TikTok right. I can’t even dip into the mindless hopeless waves of look-at-me opinion posting, and I still haven’t bothered to read or learn why. Whether it’s some stupid thing I didn’t catch in the post settings, or, as my mind naturally assessed, indicative of the arbitrary tyranny and control of a platform to silence any potential for solidarity around class struggle, I don’t know. I uninstalled the app. (The second video I posted worked, I just checked right now. 34 views!)

That panic allows me to kill the part of me that feels too stupid for finding myself Door Dashing. I’m the guy who cheerleads his clients to work to get their lives together. We’re both doing the same kind of job because I dropped the ball. Yes, yes, “the system,” yada yada, I’m totally on board with how damning and impossible it is. But also, I tend to hack the system and have clearly been getting lazy. At least, that’s easiest to believe. If I can centralize the problem on me and what I’m fucking up, there’s a certain ironic hope that it can actually be fixed. If I’m truly caked in as much shit across settings as I fear, now we’re flirting with some properly life-ending darkness narratives. I’m not keen to die, so what’s the takeaway?

I didn’t really want the job I didn’t get. It didn’t feel like something that was going to be stimulating, worth the drive and time, and wouldn’t meet my actual desire to find something fully remote. It’s the inconsistency of the income combined with car costs that fuel my catastrophic thinking.

Anyway, I must have reached the end of my breakdown for the moment as I’ve reinstalled TikTok and started posting inflammatory content. Pray for me! I’m told it just takes one sponsor or viral moment.

[1239] Take Me Out

I’m going to keep writing until I dig out the heart of what’s lodged in me.

I just got back inside after engaging in a kind of ritual. I have a dozen things related to the development, organizing, and cleaning up of my land at any given time. I have a block of well over a hundred tires. I have overgrown weeds and prickly bushes weaving their way through a scrap pile. I have hundreds of pallets, bricks, and panels. I have windows and old mowers. It truly is a snapshot into the white-trash half of my blood that I guess felt neglected growing up.

Today was cutting through a lot of the brush and beginning to load up my truck with steel for the scrap yard. I’m trying to not get short changed, so it’s spending time applying a magnet and cutting away plastic or aluminum from different pieces. It’s kinda dirty, occasionally painful, and something you have to go about in a very specific way or you’ll get nothing done. It’s snipping bit by bit the thorny vines. It’s noticing how pieces attach to each other and having the right tool available. It’s trekking back and forth from the truck to the pile and taking solace in the little bits of order you’ve wrangled from the chaos.

At some level, it’s simply preoccupying my brain which is otherwise plagued by enough thoughts to start me on my third digression in 3 days. At another, it’s cleaning up and accounting for one more piece of my pie-in-the-sky vision of how I was going to operate from my sustainable land in the middle of nowhere. Isn’t it romantic to think you can get by patiently breaking down and recycling what you’ve collected over months or years, and have it pay? That pile of tires I’m working into a, functionally, art project, that will also serve as a privacy fence.

There’s a few problems with the dream, not least of which that it’s winter in Indiana. Yes, you get these odd days where it’s like a cold spring, but it could snowstorm in the next 15 minutes, and then rain for 3 months, and now all my plans on what to do next for the pile become moot. Also, scrapping doesn’t pay much. The most I ever got was in dropping off a load of cast iron radiators, which lowered my raised truck bed almost to the ground, and got me a little over $100. It also takes a lot of time to disassemble little rubber bits from complicated metal pieces. The tools it takes to do the job need replacement pieces that break or get lost.

More to the point, a dream turns into a chore, and barely one that feels tolerable the more you get into the, often actual, weeds. The effort doesn’t feel precisely “wasted,” but you’re forced into a tempered place.

“Tempered” is different from “defeated.” I worry that over the last few weeks, and last several days in particular, I’ve been defeating myself. I find it hard to operate from an endlessly motivated and optimistic place when I’m staring down what feels like a miserable series of obligating tasks. That’s humbling, or humiliating, work tasks. That’s legitimately needing to borrow money. That’s the tortured negotiation as to whether I “deserve” or “can afford” to get fast food, and what that says about my “respect” for the hole it feels I’m in.

I’m the kind of person who has spent years of his life proud to exist on ramen noodles, hotdogs, the dollar menu, bologna, and $1 or less frozen dinners. Back when it meant I was doing right and saving. Was I raised on super-sized double quarter pounders? Yes. Will a double cheeseburger suffice? Absolutely. When you’re stressing over every dollar, the difference between a $4.28 meal and a $10 one can’t be ignored.

What for? I keep returning to this question with regard to my behavior. Why do I want to get out of debt, even if it meant owing friends or chopping up my land? I feel good about the idea of working for friends. I don’t feel good working for anyone else. Why was I trying to save money in the past? I was saving for what I needed to build my house, and start my businesses, and invest in “the dream.” I wasn’t depriving myself of the burger I’d prefer; I was advocating for the future. There was no conflict until the future never seemed to arrive.

I think developing a TV watching habit, and then investing in going to shows both grew out of a desire to live more in the present. At least make peace with the present. If “right now” I have things to look forward to, to plan around, to budget for, then no matter what else is bugging me or is failing to arrive, the show is probably still going to go on. There are systems with more money and competence than I can plug into that keep the monkeys dancing and singing on stage, so why not join them as often as I can? Why not do what feels like stealing memories from a world trying to dysregulate or kill me?

This has all been a diatribe at the individual level. I can’t wait to have AI analyze the piece and tell me how the introduction of “fascism” or broad political issue is where I might lose “the reader.” If you’re even barely online you’re catching a headline of the not-slow-enough descent into abject chaos and violence. Resist the temptation to mock yourself for your paltry individual concerns when you’ve a president routinely picking at the fabric of the world order. I don’t trust even my closest friends to be a meaningful bulwark against what I believe has a legitimate chance to get us all killed. “Conflicted” doesn’t begin to cover it.

If I get everything I want personally tomorrow, my environment is still on fire. My future isn’t up to me. Every meal feels spiritually like the last one. Every show a selfishly defiant protest begging-to-be-violated by the armed religious fanatics next door. Hunker down and wait it out? Use my voice? Join the latest protest and feign the emotional outrage I’m supposed to sustain for the raped children, then the murdered children, then the exploited workers, then the beleaguered minority, then the feckless complicit politicians, on and on as I get bombarded with hot takes from people I would otherwise respect until they tell me Erika Kirk was gracious in her forgiveness. Bitch is a lying reality-show bot parlaying the attention economy to capitalize on her propaganda partner-in-shill’s death. Obviously. Do I want attention-whore shills saying nice things? I'd prefer people who actually practiced them, and the work getting the credit, not the words mindlessly parroted as though they represent genuinely shared decency. You don't marry someone like Charlie Kirk because either of you are good people. 

You say otherwise because you don’t consciously believe in anything. You’re as arbitrary as I feel, but it’s dressed up in modern garb. You’re not suffering your loneliness, ego, and megalomania, you’re a reality TV star! You’re not a greedy liar stealing from the poor, you’re a tech genius capitalist! You’re not stupid, you just have valid different opinions. Round and round we circle the drain, pretending “meaning” even means anything anymore. What you are is preoccupied, overwhelmed, dead inside, nihilistic, solipsistic, cynical, lazy, judgmental, confused, hateful, smug, lonely, hypocritical, scared, and foundationally unapologetic about how many things you’ll help kill before you catch yourself admitting to any of it.

So I should work for a company that can determine how desperate I am to take $3 food orders 30 minutes across town and adjust how much it pays me in real time? I should pay back Chase who will get bailed out for gambling with other people’s money? I should stop eating what I want or going to shows because I don’t deserve a sustainable “right now” series of thoughts, I should always be at the mercy of what it would take to “fix” the next problem I didn’t create. I should spend almost all of my ever-fleeting time at the mercy and directives of the equally lost, but certainly quicker to adopt their helplessness than me?

When I feel stuck, I explore different frames. The problem is that every frame is begging the same kind of question and delivering the same kind of answer. I’m one fucking person. I don’t believe any singular story I can tell about myself. Of the last 3 things I’ve written which one is “most true?” It’s absurd. It’s all at once, today, ten years from now, and it echoes the same shit I’ve been writing about for 20 years. Where the fuck am I, or it, supposed to go?

[1238] Pop Psychology

I doubt this is the right way to say it , but I’m jealous of people who find themselves in a worthwhile bubble.

The types of bubbles that come to mind are about family, music, and comedy. I know people with big enough families that it’s seemingly every day it’s someone’s birthday, or graduation, or new job. There’s a ton of get togethers and vacations planned. You don’t need to know anything else about that family other than they’ve got a persistent recorder and shout-outer who seems genuinely enthusiastic about the job. In music, it’s seeing artists I like pop up in random places; their talent being recognized as belonging in any band or on any stage. In comedy, it’s imagining sitting at “the table,” and casually working out jokes with people who keep you in the back of their head as a bit player if they get a sitcom.

I’m not confused or naive about the amount of work it takes to fit in anywhere. I know how often people have to bend over backwards to make peace with the messiness of their families. I know there are an endless list of sorrowful and ridiculous tales as it pertains to the entertainment industry. But you can definitely see when someone fits. You know they’re being looked out for, celebrated, and people want them to be around.

I thought I had something like that both at my first job at the movie theater, and then for a few years in college. It’s times where it felt like I was in something of a surrogate family. I’ve had individual members of my actual family contribute to that feeling, but one or two people does not constitute a group vibe and environment. I could point pretty quickly to all of the fucked up things within those spaces, but they were genuinely irrelevant to something “higher” that seemed to be going on in how we worked together or joked. Many things didn’t need to be said, and you could truly trust people do what you needed of them in service to that shared dynamic.

Of course, people grow up, move away, get fired, or die. New management comes in. Life stressors pile on and less-vocalized dreams get pursued and crash into the reality of the attempt. All of a sudden nostalgia might rear its ugly head. Now, you wonder if you should have spent more time checking in and talking out alienating gossip. Or, and I think this is what most people do, they either isolate or force a new kind of togetherness that scratches a basic human itch, but maybe never quite tastes right.

Increasingly, I’m suspicious that the type of vibe or connectedness I’m exploring can be created. It has to be an accident, no? My first job had like 60 people, in pretty active rotation, working at any one time. Certainly those that hung on long enough formed a certain core, but also separate from others who hung on just as long but remained cunts. In college, there were regular groups and dorms who partied together, and you can do a certain amount of filtering out those who puke on your shit or fight. But a third of that crowd I went to high school with, and we weren’t close there. Then the saddest T. Swift fear comes creeping in that they never loved me, or her, or anyone, or anything.

The next closest things I had to that kind of, at least informal support systems, have literally betrayed me financially, on several occasions, and/or threatened my life. I didn’t wish my ex-best-friend’s family a Merry Christmas or Happy New Year. They didn’t reach out to me either. Nor was there an exchange between me and my actual brother. I went home for a couple days, ate dinner, collected my few hundred dollars, and retreated back to my fort.

I’m carrying on as though I don’t spend time with my friends, and none of this is meant to dismiss or downplay the significance of their impact on me or my appreciation for them. They, too, have vibes and environments that I don’t. They’re close with their messy families. They’ve got “real jobs.” They join sports leagues or faith groups. Most of them I bump into maybe once every 3 to 6 months, if that. We’re close enough that I can be trusted to house-sit for a week, but finding the time for a regular dinner or game night would be a stretch given our habits, obligations, and limitations I surmise. If we get jobs at the same spot, that’s kind of like bowling together, right?

I also have my little bizarro community in Last War. People I’ve never met, heard, or seen consistently laugh at the goofy shit I put into the chat, and you get drive-by conversations of human connection about IRL things. Am I addicted to incrementally increasing my troop power? Or, is it hard to shake the feeling of being wanted when my account was locked out for weeks, and they didn’t kick me out of the alliance?

I can’t tell sometimes if I write in the world’s most useless bid to build a community. That was a random thing I often forget about, getting 213 followers on Sondry before it went dead. Like, if I had started a Substack at the right time or adopted Wordpress sooner, could I be one of those niche voices who’s making just enough money to “do whatever is they do” with my reflections? Is the community there, but also knows you shouldn’t try on reddit? I retain this belief that my life can systematically change on the back of one conversation or one connection. And not just for the worse as someone says, “Time to die, mother fucker!” before pulling a trigger.

I’m always doing the math. I’m trying to put numbers behind my “objective” good place I exist in nearly every moment of every day. If you read through my writing, you’ll see dozens of times where I speak to being fed, clothed, having nice shit, creating memories, and exercising my options and creativity. I’m trying to be at peace as though I’ve been doing what I want/need to all along were I to die tomorrow. I’m trying to exercise my voice and choices in a manner that I observe an incredible amount of people seemingly unable to do. The dark side of these places you fit is that it’s perhaps hard to distinguish where “you” exist. Indeed, the more “I” stuck out, the less anyone, generally, has wanted anything to do with me.

It’s disorienting to feel like you have to stumble into the kind of place I miss by accident, and be as intentional as I try to be. Surely, I should just fix my situation and go make friends, right? Talk more on the Discord with the other people who go to too many concerts and get deep into their interpersonal lore and inside jokes. Get paired up with a bunch of randos in a bowling league. Organize the Google Meet with your Last War compatriots. It’s. So. Simple. Once you power through the contrivances, your newest bestest friends will manifest. It’ll be just like when you threw the house parties.

It won’t be the 150th time you were the inviter instead of invited. It won’t be creating a dozen cringe faces as those who aren’t used to you hear how you joke or speak when you’re trying not to perform to get along. It won’t be filling you with dread and sadness as you clock the holes at the center of your group that aren’t getting filled by the activity anymore than yours is. It won’t be any of that you have to shuffle aside in regular blogs as you argue for the utility of being social and moving around more often. It won’t be an awkward series of adult play-dates with people you would have bullied in high school, because you’re kind of a dick, and no amount of getting old or more nuanced and understanding erases based animal impressions. That sounds remarkably like the exact excuses to keep not doing the things, no?

But also, I’m almost too much a man of action. My inaction is something I can rely on as telling me earnestly what I do or don’t want. Nothing’s stopping me, and I don’t have the patience that you need in being the one who’s trying right now. I’m more than mollified going to shows with my friend or dad. I’m comfortable doing things alone. I’d take another group, but I’m not going to live or die by it.

[1237] Pointy Fingers

I think I’m gonna need to uncover what I want to talk about as I do.

Part of me wants to talk about attention. As a watcher of hundreds of shows, listener to dozens of podcasts, and attender of hundreds of performances, my sense of how I utilize my attention might be an aberration. Sam Harris beckons us to “wake up,” an idea echoed from one of my favorite movies Waking Life. The throughline of a movie I first caught as a teenager to the words of a public thinker today is my memory and expression of my attention.

It strikes me as mutually if not equally important to consider not just what you focus on, but how. Rich people talking about issues talk about them differently than “average” or “poor” people. I still don’t get the sense that any camp really clocks that difference. It’s one highlighted when you bounce between podcasts. Posh intellectual types speak differently than contributors to the brand, and seemingly what ties them all together is the ability to confidently assert their opinions as good as any person with a million views ranting in their car.

Why would we want attention altogether? We know people monetize it. We know how isolated and angry or anxious people feel, so when someone even pretends to see it there’s a vein of solidarity. As a counselor, I tend to see the exact opposite desire. The more people pay attention, the more they see how responsible they are, and they don’t like that. The more they focus, the more they feel the layers of contradictions and discomfort in their body. It’s akin to being invited to working out, and immediately recoiling from the pain.

If you’re like me, I hate working out. I hate running. I did yoga again for the first time in months, and it was incredibly painful, and I felt immediately better, which has carried into today. The payout is rarely in the moment, and my scattered attention feels mildly tortured focusing on the pain behind my knees as I stretch and shift my hips back. I can also recall a time where I ran so consistently playing ultimate frisbee that I stopped getting winded over the course of two back-to-back games. My attention, when there’s mitigating factors, can be utilized to substantially better health than I regularly maintain otherwise.

I just got back home. My home is an endless series of calls for my attention. My computer has nine screens. I have hundreds of shows left to watch. My water has been broken for weeks. The instruments glare at me. The half-finished cutting board woodworking project is hanging out. The next videogame can be popped in or my phone is going to buzz that my resource production has maxed in Last War. My cat tries to force herself into my lap. I’m a little hungry. I’m a little cold. I have 259, functionally spam emails, from things I’ve at one point shown an interest in.

Those emails are all running the same kind of “give me your attention” game, thus they all become flat and “too much” very quickly. If any given journalist or essayist needs to post 3-10 times a week, you think I’m reading all that? If I’ve been to 50 different venues who all want me to see who’s coming up next…If I’ve expressed 30 seconds of interest in your guitar course and then you email me 30 times to remember to checkout or with your even better deal…It’s impossible to give a fuck. Now, I kinda hate what I sorta liked. Even the things pretending to organize it all, like Unroll Me, are junk, and you’ll spend as much time arguing with it as you would just deleting everything or unsubscribing.

Between this paragraph and the last I tackled my email. This month I got 113 unopened messages about performances at different venues or from band-tracking apps, and 105 unopened messages from a group I’ve just labeled “Talkers,” be they individual journalists, writers, statisticians, or podcasters. That’s not including actual spam, or those endless multi-tier email auto-signups if you click through an ad or sign up for something in order to order. Buried in all that bullshit were 2 emails I actually needed to focus on, my accidentally almost-lapsed car insurance, and what I need to do for/with a debt consolidation company.

While I’m writing I’m pausing to kill zombies. I’m contemplating heading outside to “pretty up” my white-trash looking property, or heading to town to Door Dash a bit. The calculation, the “why,” driving my behavior has been situated in a decently arbitrary place for quite some time. I have loose “wants.” My needs I’m never truly without. By extension, what grabs my focus often feels arbitrary or meaningless or on its way to being something I kinda liked that turns into something I sorta hate. I need more money, but only because I want to feel better about where I’m situated in what I owe to friends or family who need it in exactly the manner I do. I’m not taking food out of kids' mouths, like my Nazi governor, but it doesn’t mean I like the look, even fleetingly, like a leaching piece of shit.

Here’s where my orientation gets baited. I also have an exhaustive personality. If I decide to focus on one thing, I will do that one thing until I break. If I can convince myself that I am, in fact, too big of a leaching piece of shit, you won’t hear from me until I’ve fixed my problem so definitively, I can hardly recognize why I considered it a problem in the first place. I’ll be back to working sun up to sun down. I’ll sell everything there is to sell. I’ll eat the same cost-effective sandwich for every meal. I’ll essentially be playing dress-up as a guy with “real problems” and taking on the noble stress of how to be accountable to them.

In order to do that, I’d have to ignore, never forget, everything that has contributed to my current circumstances. I’d have to personalize every single detail as though there was no good reason to choose otherwise in the moment that I decided to increase my debt or stay in instead of drive all day and night. It becomes this all-encompassing, and ridiculous, exercise in self-flagellation. It’s barely sustainable. It’s not going to win me a medal or adoration. Why am I working then? For who? To get what? To build what? I want to keep doing almost all of what I’m currently doing, it’s just not mathing right in who I’d prefer to owe and over what time frame.

Hopefully, I find out in the next day or so whether I’ll have secured a new “normal” full-time job. I don’t hate the idea of a consistent paycheck. Combining that with any luck whatsoever in selling what I wish to sell should help me fix my debt situation in 3 months. The catastrophic feelings I catch when I look at my bank account or think about when someone covers a meal for me will swing the opposite direction. Theoretically, the weather will improve a little by then. I always have “so much” work to do, and yet observe myself sitting, waiting, and trying to efficiently approach so I don’t churn myself into a bitter and exhausted husk. I will do it. It’s a genuine worry I will pick that. And that’s precisely the point where you actually would only have yourself to blame.

[1236] If You Jump

It's 3:12 AM and I've finally come down from my gently-manic thinking and energy. I'm, let's call it halfway, through rearranging/cleaning my woodshop. I’m covered in a decent amount of spiderwebs, and dust has definitely made its way to some crevasse in my throat. I’ve noticed over the last few days I’m returning to clenching my jaw. I’m anticipating something of a radical shift in how I approach my time and priorities.

On New Year’s Eve, it will be the 110th fun thing I’ve done for myself, with a friend, or my dad. The final show, The Phantom of the Opera, in Chicago, then I’m sure we’ll find somewhere to hang until it’s time to countdown. It will be the 423rd thing I’ve gone to over the last 4 years. When I made this into a series of bar graphs, predictably “the internet” was disinterested and asked me if I had a trust fund. No, I just live within 4 hours of a few major cities and don’t have kids.

Hyper-productive manic-ish periods happen less often as I get older. I used to have a belief system that would fuel them quasi-indefinitely. I thought there was something real, lasting, and meaningful to achieve. I thought it would make me rich. I thought I’d get the right kind of attention and power. I thought I’d get to live on a kind of auto-pilot as “things” sorted themselves out under my limited direction or decision to adopt a new goal. I had zero inclination that I would be well-enough on my way to 40 and be living in a kind of bizzaro forever-not-quite space.

It’s a few days after Christmas. I hate going home. My dad and step-mom are cool, the rest of the people who occupy their home I find exhausting, insufferable, boring, and often anger-inducing if I ruminate on how they’ve fucked me financially. They run the same playbook at every dinner table. There’s the family gossip. There’s the latest movies and sports. There’s who is sick, work drama, and particularly pointed digressions on the biggest family embarrassment of the last 6 to 12 months. My uncle this year trotted out the cliche trope, “Kids just don’t want to work.”

This uncle gives me $100 every Christmas, perfectly ambivalent about inflation. This is an uncle who I grew up watching verbally abuse and berate my grandma. This is an uncle who lived with that grandma until she had a stroke and functionally died. He’s spent 99% of his 60+ years on the planet co-habitating with either his parents or my other uncle, never in a long-term relationship, and making friends who accomplish things like suicide by cop and ballooning to over 400 pounds. If he knew anything about incels, he could have led them to Hell sooner than any modern macho man-baby influencer today.

This is an uncle who has stolen my grandma’s house when she died. This is an uncle who has talked his entire life about “the job in such and such” that he’ll definitely take and move to, but somehow finds himself shackled to NW Indiana. He moved to Gurnee for, I think it was a couple months, before scurrying back to grandma’s when I was like 13. He’s got strong opinions about where people my age and younger are coming from regarding their work ethic and culture that abandoned them. When I, humbly, explain that my half a dozen social work roles and thousands of conversations with people through counseling suggest giant gaps in experience and practice, “That’s bullshit” his pithy reply before waddling to the couch to talk guns with, 10 years younger than me, step-brother…who has also never left home.

I don’t make excuses for people, but I don’t deny seeing when something fundamental is missing. The heart of whatever has made this country genuinely great has gone missing. It disappeared when we stopped showing people how to change tires. It evaporated with the idea that we should capitalize on instead of invest in each other. It blinked right out of existence the moment we leaned into the ignorance and hatred and judgmental attitudes that have always been there, but otherwise transcended as we marched forward.

I’ve been watching a lot of Ken Burns documentaries. He plants you into whatever world he’s discussing. He’s got the details, the stories, the quotes from the people making the decisions. If someone itches in how he’s explaining, you’re scratching. You get this incredibly rich and alive sense about how decisions were being made. You get baked into the cake. You grasp the pressures people were under and glimpse the reasons they were hesitant to “do the right thing” or might find themselves getting harshly criticized by modern eyes.

And then you also see how little things change. You see the exact same fears and prejudices play out, it’s just pick a different population. It’s recycled slogans. It’s the same excuse-ridden tribalism and intellectual laziness that’s on an endless loop in your cultivated feed. My feed I think is clocking my frustration with seeing nothing but pushed content, so now will be fascist curious? It’s bizarre, and I’m thankful to be generally engaging with the online world at all less and less. The powerful do cliche powerful things. The poors react. The educated pray to be judged by the sensibilities and “obviousness” of their oratory and thinking at the time.

There’s always the people who are already in the future though. There’s those that don’t need to “evolve” on issues because political winds tell them too. For some, slavery was never debatable. For some, equality meant just that, so in their advocacy of course* it meant women and anyone from any culture who stood for the American ideal. If you don’t know what that is, or you co-opt it like an infectious disease and zombify, then “things” become “debatable” and “mere opinions.” When that happens to vaccines, foreign policy as it pertains to war criminal autocrats, and the consequences of greed, you have good reason to suspect the whole thing could go away if you’re not careful.

For most of my life I’ve felt like time was running out. The race against the clock was added fuel to push past the pain behind my eyes or desire to take a break and eat or shower. No matter how much I push through my experience, I continue to find time to feel “stuck” or “waiting.” I continue to use days and weeks to persuade myself to dip into the sea of mania so I can reaffirm who I’ve known myself to be. For me, an insatiable drive to create or work is now a mockery; the story of an abandoned ideal. I’ve suffered the consequences of my genuine beliefs, in family, in friends, in “the system,” in my intelligence, or my ethics. Most often, I’m abandoned or ignored, and my uncle’s, “That’s bullshit” echoes when we arrive at the question of who is to blame.

If I have enough time, money, and freedom to hit a show every day of the year it will not fix the rot at the heart of my family, work environments, or “friendly” superficial or antagonistic relationships. It won’t make my psychopathic ex-best friend own his betrayal and start shelling out what he owes me. It won’t make my uncle reflect on every hateful word he said to my grandma, nor shell out the money he owes me. It won’t make my aunt understand what she neglected that led to the death of, what may soon be, both of her sons before the age of 45. It won’t change the heart of my newest boss or bureaucratic nightmare to push for a living wage. It won’t make the water drinkable, or my fascist governor and attorney general less greedy trolls. I won’t make my closest friends anymore energetic or enthusiastic or available. I won’t get my water fixed, land occupied, nor in shape.

I’ll just have something to do and think about that isn’t explicitly inviting me to think about what I don’t have that I really need.

It’s not your god or some transcendent notion of reason. It’s not license. I don’t even care if you understand me. I just need to share. I need to give away what it feels I’ve won through a ceaseless battle against getting swept up by what I’m aware of. If I can share it, then it’s not just mine, and things don’t have to register as too personal. If many hands make light work, if we all bothered to pick up after ourselves, it might not even register as work at all.