If you’re lost in the woods, do a better job of defining your goals. Previous goals consisted of the ownership of a few expensive items, the entanglement of some hot bodies, the completion of goals imposed upon me academically, and the appeasing of my maybe aspergers-ocd-adjacent tendencies by overindulgence of media or books. In one form or another, I’ve, semi-disingenuously reduced most of my goals to dollar amounts. My website is the price of a very specific competent programmer. My living conditions every day’s wages cost of copper wire and the proper lawn equipment. My social goals the ability to attract people who, arguably couldn’t care one way or another, to my environment where I play a Gatsby cliche to their indulgence and escapism.
There’s always the overarching goal of some level or another that can be construed as “world domination.” Finding “help” is a standing goal that perhaps will never be met. I could use people who advertise and charge for their time who will pick up their phones and follow through. Having basically zero problems with myself that I can’t chalk up to psychosomatic unpredictability, my goals naturally extend, and are thus dictated by, ick, the world. 12 hour days most days of the week will do enough to whittle down your brain. Add car dwelling and too many hours of the McDonald's soundtrack and “just google it and learn it yourself” becomes not merely laughable but marginally depressing.
I want to get off the same note. I’m never without at least a dozen things I could do that are necessary and time consuming and important, and yet I sit and roast and get honked at. I’ve decided I don’t like any form of “wage slavery” no matter how easy it is. I want to be able to move. I want to know that there’s ways of increasing my cash or my standing in the off minutes. I don’t have another payment due on the shed for 2 months. If I had the equipment, that’s 2 months of weed killing or hill building or pipe laying or driveway cultivating on and on. I’ve made like $500 in 5 days, but I don’t even know if that’s “good.” I know it’s better than every other job I’ve had in town, but it still doesn’t touch studies. I have the “freedom” to leave when I want, but if you have nowhere to be except an hour away to do work, you just sort of stay in the work pocket that’s paying you.
I miss feeling like there’s a place for me more than I realize. It’s places like China and New York that people feel the most alone where you’re packed together closer than anywhere else. But the spirits aren’t aligned. The priorities shoot past each other. The obligations and goals can’t even pronounce each other. What good is having the world if it’s a cold indifferent hellscape? Why prepare a feast to eat alone? Why make the money only to watch it irresponsibly disappear into the hands of those who consider it more real than you? What is the goal? I keep asking people to a procession of depressed comments and fatalistic pithiness. What is the goal in the face of a world you barely want to occupy in the first place? When mere indulgence is a crying insult and the world in tears begs of you, “What do you want from me?”
I never had a goal of getting a girlfriend or getting married or having kids. I never even really had a dollar amount beyond lazily referring to a million dollars as a standard. I never quietly asked for a best friend or a puppy. I didn’t ask for my car. I want skills and experiences. I want genuine conversations and questions and jokes. I want access and convenience and the level of security and comfort that comes with being thoughtful and prepared. I want calculated risk. I want the truth of sacrifice, and I want to create and build. But mostly I want to do all of those things faster. I want someone to challenge me so that I’m not wholly consumed by spite. I want people to shut the fuck up if they’re not going to help. I want to rediscover the reasons for my friendships besides “solid enough company, occasionally.” I want somewhere to go.
I don’t even know if it can ever be fast enough. I don’t know why I insist it should go fast besides the feeling that I’m 8 or so years behind. Behind my best conception of myself. Behind when I could reason what I want to see was really needed. But I have no way to account for the rest of the world. I have to take their honks and jeers like I do driving for spending too much time in their plain. I’m weaving in and out of their understanding of the world. I’m crashing on the fringes of their concrete. I epitomize the ironic cliche in finding myself leashed to their world convinced too well of my own virtue and capacity, not that it’s all that virtuous, but more than nominally implicated.
Wouldn’t you know it, the dinner rush is hitting.
