The whole condensing of time phenomenon is really coming to a head for me. I feel like I was just at the yearly baseball game my dad, brother, uncle, and I go to but know it’s just around the corner. I’ve been talking forever about my map or some TV show that, when I stop to think, has been in my life for several years. Big emotional sticking points are still somewhat familiar and part of the ebb more than some majestic defining moment! for where I want to point the ship. If it weren’t for holidays or birthdays, I sometimes wonder if we’d lose all sense of time altogether. It’s a less depressing thought than thinking my days are so devoid of meaningful variation I’ve just forgotten them.
“You get what you give.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about this line because several, random, people have expressed it in short succession around me. If it’s true, I’ve either given a fuck ton or not nearly enough. The only thing frustrating about the former is that I can feel rather palpably the desire to “give more.” I’ve said I’m not the Big Brother or soup line kind of helper. If it can be done by a naive do-gooder or robot, I hardly feel I’m really giving anything there, and we can never forget, giving is about how you feel. Because how could it not? How else to explain all the empty and failed attempts at “help” and “charity” touted every day? I think it helps account for why I know so many “nice” people who attract all the other people with different resources and knowledge I don’t want to bother talking to in the meantime.
For me, age is about that battle between “incidental” and “intentional.” Do you claim special wisdom by leading with a boisterous, “I’m 40! What do you know?!” Can you instead be the wise one who pursued relationships earnestly, tried and failed dozens of projects, and put yourself in uncomfortable situations that gave you deep appreciable nuanced feelings? I’ve got less than a year and one month to sum up “my 20’s” as more than throwaway comments about youthful indiscretion and bacchanals. I legitimately thought I’d be fairly rich (that is, richer than I objectively already am if we read “Pull.”), by now and...I don’t know, be doing something rich white dudes do to exhibit their control and power. I didn’t really have a humanitarian bend until I started reading Alternet my junior year of college. Dammed sobering maturity.
I don’t really have that sense of reassured calm that takes everything in stride and thinks time will heal all wounds. My dad had me at my age. And for him, I’m sure it was like yesterday. It’s not, and he dropped my ass off into Hitler 2’s boiling hot America. When I’m 2 thousand blogs down the line writing about “the surviving countries” of some irresponsible nuclear war (remember, only a few inches under ground can protect you from fallout, and I have 5 acres to dig into), will I be able to look back and say it felt as real now as it will then? What if positivity wins out and I’m 60 celebrating the adoption of progressive principles in a majority of nations and the longest period of peace the world has ever known because someone introduced the tools and strategies to get along better? Either way, while one certainly feels more likely to me, they both feel real.
For as much as I’ve found, I always feel like I’m looking. Seriously, who needs to watch that much TV? Drama drama drama, will they won’t they, understudy writers here, obvious joke, majestic still computer-ish-looking set, actor I formally had respect for clearly made too much money on last project and picked this new thing for...reasons. But that story. That telling and retelling across ages can never die. The themes and the characters speak to something fateful whether the story seems easy to anticipate or not. Regardless of the shitty dialogue or cheap effects, we’re always looking. TV is also just a catch-all for whether you read, gossip, or make shit up in your own head. You have to see something embodied before you can extract the meaning.
With that idea in tow, I have to prove to myself I can get the better of circumstances I didn’t precisely choose and which come with every level of caveats. It’s not impossible to kill every living thing on 5 acres, it’s just a considerable pain in the ass. I can operate the basic tools to not cook or freeze myself to death, and the slow march to affording each piece $100 or $200 at a time is well within the boundaries of the shittiest of shit paying jobs. Will I be better for the struggle? How many beads of sweat need to come off this beehive haired head before the final concept is allowed to shine as brightly as it does in my head? It’s not a “wish” or “dream” anymore, but an inevitable slog through menial tasks and crossing my fingers nothing catastrophic happens.
Feels a lot less like fate and a lot more like work then. Feels like a yearning to ask for help, even though you know full well it was your decisions and your perspective that brought you here, and is therefore your responsibility. But even if I, in theory, gave “everything” of myself, it wouldn’t necessarily be what people need. I think this is why I phrase what I’m doing as attempting to provide an opportunity to invest in yourself. It’s an exceedingly hard thing to do the more ties you have to “normalcy.” But, if you have the money and not the time, I can do it for it you. If you have the knowledge and not the space, use mine. Maybe you have the time or idea and no one to help you. I’ve certainly fucked myself over with providing my time and attention to many, many people across different topics who in no way shape or form utilized or respected it.
Maybe there’s a direct relationship to my entertaining of fate to the degree I feel it in my bones what I’m willing to work towards. I also pay the passing deference to dying on the highway at random rendering all of my big ideas and haha plans mute. But if I’m allowed to account for the seeds I’ve planted, the trajectory is still a positive one. Whether we climate change hockey stick it or not I think depends much less on my story and significantly more on whether I ever work deliberately with a group. I think a vitally important ethos of that group will be the independent drives and perspectives used to fuel it. I like “perfect soldiers” when it comes to checking off tasks, but I need vision. I need independent musicians working in concert. It’s hard enough to drag my own ass through the tick-ridden field without having to be your beggar or cheerleader.
I’m always one person away from an exponential gain. One mechanic away from a moving business. One basic renovator away from a series of tiny livable spaces. A tractor and free wood chips would give me places to park boondockers tomorrow. If I knew what to attach to an already dug well besides “pump” or an already set septic system besides “pipes” those could be functioning as well. Everything just a bit of knowledge someone takes for granted away or a couple thousand, but more often couple hundred, dollars away. Can you repair TVs? Make coffee? Combine these 10 saved /r/entrepreneur posts on marketing and linking to make a few thousand extra every month? Can you help me catalogue and list these thousand books? Clean up and label these auditorium lights? Help me transport ream after ream of free old old carpet to lay down as temporary driveway? FIND ME A PLACE TO PARK!?
At any one moment I have no less than 20 different things I could use help with that all speak to some kind of investment or knowledge acquisition that will crossover or at the very least get checked off as “anything potentially profitable to do that was practically free to experiment with,” and not a single task would take more than a day. Why does it take me months? Because I need to spend 11 hours a day driving around town for maybe $50 during the summer weeks. Because I can fuck my back up twice in a week. Because the weather sucks and people don’t answer their fucking phones. The other side has you needing to pay the bills and not wanting to spend your sparse free time rearranging boxes of books or a treadmill.
From the outside, everything about me seems a tad scatterbrained and disorganized as I strike familiar chords one day and then introduce a whole new side plot with a partner or goats! Is anyone else eagerly waiting for me to post cover videos showing off how much I’ve learned the 10 instruments I bought that one week? It gets dramatically worse if you consider the $75 worth of dodgeballs I have stored in my trunk that I haven’t found anyone excited to play with EVEN ONCE for YEARS (September 30th, 2013. Thanks, Amazon.) Before I failed to get people excited about quasi-speculative business and salvaging/saving endeavors, I couldn’t even get them to throw balls at each other! AND I STILL WANT TO PLAY TODAY AS EAGERLY AS WHEN I BOUGHT THE FUCKING THINGS!
I can’t shake that sentiment. I’m negative!!!??? I pursue so many positive directions you’d think I’d be dead of AIDS! I keep so many lines of potential and ::ick:: “hope” alive I’m practically drowning. And I still go out of my way to help you do shit like pick up girls or shittily teach children or help you move or drive you to the doctor or to a party. I offer money I don’t really have to pay for the gas or to cover the drinks just to get you out of the house. I called study money an undeserved joke I tried to put towards something useful like getting people back in school or helping prop up their business. I feel excessively cold and distant every time I try to pay you for anything regarding doing something involving me. It wasn’t always that way!
But I’m not a martyr. I’m not a victim. I make the decision every time to be the only one to show up to your poetry reading. I know no matter how much time you’ve been given to move, I’ll be the one throwing out all of the shit that wasn’t mine, and trying to salvage my security deposit never asking for your half because I knew you couldn’t afford it. For as much as fate can be the working slog of plausible inevitability, it’s as much the baggage you’re situated with by the company you’ve kept. A realm where I no longer have to bother “expecting” things from friends beyond what I know about how to tweak and leverage them. The kind of distance and coldness that doesn’t feel. It’s just the math and timing to achieve whatever end. I hate when you put me there.
Time’s running out. Sure, time is an illusion, but you won’t be able to call it one sooner than you think. Where are the people I partied with? Where are the people that wanted to be a part of new things? Where are the ones that can take a hit from a Rhino skin dodge ball, at the very least, who can respect I got the expensive pussy balls because you said you were afraid of getting hurt? Are we ever going to do anything together again besides drink or hike a few times a year? You don’t care about my most rousing food delivery story and I don’t give a shit how big the trees were, so what’s left? What do we both share besides what used to be proximity and the same school? What makes my friends mine? What can I only get from those who I picked that no amount of acquaintances I endear myself to will ever match? I’ve lost the beat.
