I’ve tried to write this blog before. The one where I state plainly my stupid brain attached to my stupid heart that gets it pumped up and stressed out. I tried to find a context for why it made sense. I tried to explain the path forward in spite of it. I tried to understand it like there’s a reason.
If I get another person to tell me to “just breath” and “relax” and “don’t think about it” with regard to slowing the speed of my heart, I may slowly steer my car into oncoming traffic, making sure to choose a semi so no one gets hurt. I’m not a monster.
There’s nothing even at stake. Progress on my website? A strawbale addition to my garage? The moving van getting fixed? A riding lawn mower? I can, in theory, make half the amount of money in the same time I would have been gone. A month of my life then? What am I nervous about? It’s the wrong question though.
I’m stuck in this moment. I’ve been stuck here since, I think around 14. It’s why I can’t let shit go. It’s why I have to try and understand instead of forgive. It’s why I have the same dreams as an over-eager child. It’s why I harp on the relationships in my life that have lasted longer than a class period. It’s why I read blogs from 10 years ago and find the exact sentiment I needed today. I’m nervous about exactly what got me fucked up from the beginning, my entire life crashing down around me for no good goddamn reason.
The only antidote I’ve found is some measure of progress. Never a simple dollar amount, but a structure or a tool. I haven’t progressed until one of you assholes figures out what it is I’m doing and is working along side me when it’s not convenient. I haven’t progressed until people I admire see something I’ve built and begin to wonder how it can help influence their lives and endeavors.
I’m stuck in this moment, and I don’t want to be. This moment is horrifyingly lonely. This moment doesn’t sleep on a bed most nights of the week. This moment is sweaty basketball shorts and awkward conversations in a parking lot wrought with bees, flies, and the smell of garbage, occasionally interrupted by the world’s most obnoxious train conductor. This moment has my head swelling beyond comprehension at the temples for something trying to get out. This moment is a sunken hole at the dead center of my chest that can’t be breathed away or beared down on.
I spent a little gas money. I ate too much shitty food. I put a little more wear on my torn car. This didn’t even really matter, and I couldn’t get it done. I couldn’t sit politely and calmly for a procedure that’s the dead easiest fucking thing to pass! I used to love getting the cuff put on! As a kid I thought it was cool. After marathoning ER I was particularly interested in what the readouts at the Wal-Mart booths said. To fail one has meant to fail them all, if I can hijack a bad paraphrasing of some philosophical statement someone made.
I said some time ago that I haven’t been me for a very long time. I get hints of it at a house party. I can get lost in the flow of some work out on the land. But it’s few and far between. This money would have suggested I could move faster. Something in my mind’s eye might have been able to take up residence next to the garage. I don’t know, none of that sounds dramatic enough. Or, it’s not the heart of it. I just would have been able to work on what matters instead of work at what’s paying me.
I don’t matter. At least, I don’t know how else to state it. I know I’m one car in traffic in the suburbs of Chicago in all his grand failure glory driving past an infinite array of disappointments and ailments that are a universe away from being a headfucked asshole who didn’t get to nab an extra 5 grand. I know I’m small. While my heart defiantly beats harder and my breath gets shorter I try to persuade myself. Fuck me and what I want to do. Fuck me and what I could create. Fuck me to the degree I believe my own bullshit. Fuck every selfish aim and its incidental potential impact. Fuck thinking you have any control. Fuck blaming yourself over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and fucking over and over again. Fuck trying. Fuck visualizing yourself hanging from an extension cord because if your head’s already about to pop, might as well seek a direction that will actually feel like a fucking relief, right?
I’m so tired. I’m so tired of talking. I’m so tired of waiting. I’m so tired of thinking the exact same things because they’re right and worth it and when they can’t be done you don’t get to move on.
Enough times it’s happened where while I’m writing I manage to just knock out of the park a line that sticks with me for weeks. Something like that happens or a calm will wash over me. My breathing will return to normal. My brain will feel less packed. I’ve never been able to do that thinking about this study anxiety. Maybe I’ve talked around the edges of it, maybe not. Maybe I have even the basest understanding of psychosomatic responses, maybe I’m such an inbuilt contrarian I’ve robbed myself of the capacity to change.
The last paragraph was started after I put this down and just forced myself to sleep. I pick up writing again after 13 hours. I had a dream that isn’t exactly recurring, but it’s a similar theme. I find myself in a giant bathroom with many different doors leading out of it. Some are locked. Some seem like they’re going to lead somewhere. Some have people's names on them like they’re reserved. This one had someone telling me about a space I had occupied being taken over by some people who didn’t really have any business taking it over. Someone led me through this giant bathroom that was supposed to act as a shortcut, but only ended up as a dead end. I try every door on the wall on my race back to where we entered and realize I’ve wasted a ton of time not just going to my space the way I knew how instead of following their advice and direction. The last door I tried had “reserved for Elon Musk” which I reasoned harked back to a time when he occupied that hallway or room and nobody had taken down the sign.
As far as my psychoanalytic capacity goes, I find this dream pretty on the nose. I’m anxious over the wasted time. I’m sick of terrible naive advice on how to do something or get somewhere people have no experience contending with. I want my name on a wall. I want to know that were I to leave my shit somewhere it has every right to be, someone’s going to remove the interlopers without me having to make a mad dash to keep a lid on things.
A previous bathroom, again it being large, related to me being unable to find a stall or urinal that wasn’t absolutely disgusting to use. So it was kick open a door, huff, move on, find the layout of another one provided no privacy, find the floor flooded in the next, then 4 loud ridiculous people I knew I couldn’t stand might be ambling closer just beyond eyesight so I move onto the next. Every option shitty.
I don’t take my problems seriously enough. At least I don’t respect them. I don’t know how to perpetually wallow. It gets boring. On the car ride back I couldn’t help but recall things I recognized that made me think of some stupid or hilarious thing my friends and I did growing up. I have a kind of blindness for what things are “supposed” to mean. In the same way that I use words in ways that constantly piss people off for what I consider “no reason,” I don’t know what it means precisely when I don’t get into a study or if I were to get colon cancer, as has just happened to my uncle.
I don’t believe in karma, so trying to play some metaphysical math game is out. I don’t pretend like I know the future, so I can’t rule out my highway tragedy on the day I leave the center, having spent my last 20 days confined to kinda shitty food and odd company. I’d prefer imagining myself with more money right now, but there’s an infinite list of things that might happen in the same amount of time that speak to an infinite amount of potentials, if my head doesn’t know how to drop the anxiety as the cuff inflates, it certainly figured out how to drown itself in the ambiguities that follow.
I’ve said before that I’m not a fan of life. It’s still true. It doesn’t mean I can’t be or there aren’t features I enjoy, but overall, I’ve spent considerably more time as a toy of ignorant forces than I have being anything I’d genuinely like to consider calling “me.” I have no reason to be a fan of that. I have no reason to consider my circumstances particularly blessed. I lucked out. It’s not my responsibility to mask “luck worship” as “deep appreciation” or pretend most of the examples set for me regarding other’s luck are anything beyond escapist selfish indulgence. I was lucky to be born smart, if you ignore all of the mental health risks and social isolation that poses. I was lucky to be born good enough looking if you want to see how fast you can race to considering the vast majority of the people you meet as “unfuckable.” I was lucky enough to have a few solid examples of how to behave even fleetingly morally even as I see what befalls those who bother to give a shit.
I haven’t felt able to enjoy the fruits of what I’ve set up. Sure, the “rent” on the garage is paid up for 2 months, but I still only took a day off a week, and that was usually because I had shit to do errand wise, or really needed to shower, so it hardly felt like a day off. I work all day, at the expense of my muscles, my attention, my car, so I can move faster, not because I have to do anything. I can work 2 days a month and still have a place to sleep. Add another day a year, I pay off that gym membership for that year. Add another, there’s my car insurance. I decided to hang out at my dad’s for another day, because I can, this place has air conditioning and a bed.
I’m living my poor man’s version of the billion dollar deal that didn’t go through to bring a football team to a new city, if you want to consult a recycled plot Ballers took from Entourage. Now I need to piss off to do whatever poor billionaires do in the meantime. Try to make more money they hardly need and look for opportunities to pat themselves on the back for “giving back” in wanton fashion. I need what every fat girl with fatalistic confidence who hit me up on OKCupid needs; a friend or partner to share in the future with who matches my private wit and intensity who can see past the surface and cultivate a life on the things that matter! Now, I can’t do that for them, I don’t expect anyone to do it with me.
So it’s the wrong way to approach the question. What do I really need then? I’ve always had the answer. The attractive environment. I need to be that bird who decorates his nest and puts on a dance. I’m just a horny bird who can’t dance hard enough and who knows the choice decorations are a few miles beyond where my wings start cramping. People fall for the artifice. They cultivate their personal illusions, and yours can’t be any more damming or less inviting than what they’ve rehearsed. Beauty is an illusion? Tell that to a soft cock in a sexual neighborhood it doesn’t belong. What you need is the capacity to deceive and maintain that deception. This explains why at the front of my years of writing there’s so much talk about manipulation.
I’ve found myself pretending I want what others have. I’ll think I want “the regular job” with “benefits” and a retirement account. I’ll act like I want to get up and put on clothes that make me unrecognizable. I want to pretend that they’re getting paid much more than I am or have any more free time or free mental space. I don’t exactly fall for this illusion of “security,” but I know the social animal in me is screaming for an environment that I might fit into without buttoning up my shirt and lips. Baby rape and crackhead jokes fly pretty freely at the local DCS office? Hey, I might fit in where the reality is always considerably worse than the joke.
I know I don’t want what all that entails though. I know it because I’m not there. I’ve never really been one to force myself into an untenable situation for any longer than was necessary. Is that what this moment is? Necessary? Are there forces at work that squeeze the fuck out of my chest that know more about what needs to happen down the line? When you run out of answers, appeals to the unknown unknowns are always tempting. I can entertain the thought, but I’m not that big of an idiot to claim it’s real.
I’m sure here shorty I’ll get bored of sitting here and drive back to town. I’ll line up in the CT queue, start the next episode of some show I’m barely interested in. I’ll make another $100 and then pull my car into the corner and beckon back pain until the morning where I’ll do it again. I’ll try to keep a lookout for any “reason” “the universe” “decided” I don’t require money in an even easier fashion and the “purpose” of pursuing my goals “alone” and “too slowly.” I clearly don’t understand anything, so the idea that I’d even be able to identify it if I saw it is suspect at best.
