[705] Fuck Today

Today is a bad day. It's only 2:12, and I've spent most of it asleep. I don't know what else is in store, but it doesn't matter. At around 1 in the morning, I get an email from another useless Craigslist person telling me that I've been strung along in hoping for some help for another 3 weeks. They think there's nothing wrong with keeping someone waiting who's clearly deeply emotionally invested in creating something meaningful and profitable. I woke up at 6 in the morning feeling very tired, and texted the head of a construction company who contacted me yesterday to work on some apartments as a scab that I wasn't willing to risk getting injured on a job site without health insurance. It's been nonstop raining, I was in no way prepared to spend 9 hours pretending the 9/hr was worth it. He thanked me for letting him know, and then said, “good luck.” My email this morning read, “You have accepted the terms and conditions for working at Clustertruck” in 3 separate emails, pressing the thumb down on the point that there is no escape from anti-union, anti-legislation business practices, and you better get in line or starve. I'm trying to find the headspace to drive out to the land to drop off more money for my builder who, 3 different times now, I thought was supposed to be done building the bathroom, but something always comes up.

The Craigslist asshole reminds me of when I tried to be “robotic” in my understanding of how people operate. He echoed the tone and metre of my ex-girlfriend sophomore year of college. “Why, it's unfortunate you feel that way” is one of the most detached and ridiculous phrases you can provide someone when you've pissed them off. I do believe you have a responsibility to cope with your own feelings, but I'm not and have never been under the impression that any one person is an island and we don't affect each other. I feel like a girl who's been waiting for her long term boyfriend to propose after he said he was going to a dozen times. Then when he breaks up with me, he doesn't understand why I'm upset because “it just makes sense for him personally” to pursue women he wants to fuck more.

I'm confused on what people think my motivation is. I'm very angry that people think I'm not entitled to my anger. I don't think they appreciate the threat. I don't think they look to the future. I don't think they even believe they have lives that overlap and are of any consequence. So when I spend 3 weeks of “deliberate patience” to hear, “actually, I was lying all along” that's a net negative to not only my disposition, but to my concept of why I'm bothering at all. You know why I want to sleep all the time? Because enough of those moments back to back tear me shreds. You know why I signed those terms? Because the glancing blows some editorial from what a labor activist writes isn't going to bring down the exploitation machine we've built into how we work together. Turning down the scab gig at least wasn't me actively pursuing one more cut.

I don't need to conduct my life with any sense of purpose or joy. I can turn into the manipulative and indignant. My last attempt to refrain from inflicting that on the world is to try and sleep. I've already pulled out, stayed up all night, and stuck to my shows. I've picked a library's worth to read, and lined up the instruments to practice. I'm moving to the middle of nowhere. I've whittled down my “friends” into the handful of depressives who are as glued to facebook as I am and subset of adults who barely bother to use it at all anymore. When you recede far enough, you either kill yourself, or you lash out.

It gets worse though. An episode of misdirected anger is one thing, but what happens when you can no longer feel one way or another about it? Something I said hurt? What are you anyway? Another liar? Another person who's given up. Another bag of cliches pretending we're closer than we actually are? Another pseudo-competence for any realm beyond your own preservation? You want to chastise me, or lecture me, suggest a book to read, or wring your hands that you can finally be done listening? It's all on the table. Who cares? I speak to avatars and pixels. My appeals thrown in my face. My ideals trammeled beyond recognition. My words as hollow as my next irrational attention-seeking panic attack.

It's a bad day because writing isn't making it better. I'm going to hunch, and huff, and linger. I'm going to press too hard and dig too deeply into pimples and scabs that aren't popable or pickable. I'm going to just stare. I'm going to stare at the life I'm not living and the people I'll never meet. I'm going to stare at the empty and afraid faces who have the gall to tell me they understand how I should behave.

[704] Roller/Coaster

I want to talk a bit about the nature of my mental roller coaster.

My head, which seems to be unlike many other heads, is always looking. Occasionally, I can get lucky and have a speech or argument that lets me focus in and carry me along for an hour or two. When I was obsessed with reading everything I could regarding “religion vs science,” my day, every day, was made, because I provided myself with new questions and someone might make a reference or argument I hadn't heard before that became my personal duty to refute. I entered that realm from a highly volatile and emotional state, and I left bored out of my mind years later.

One of the biggest reasons I'm anywhere I get in life is because I can't turn it off. This blog, like most blogs, has been brewing for a day or more. Some comment set it off and I've been rehearsing a few choice lines of inspiration that need exploring. In a sense, I'm always working on what to say next, or what to create, or trying to figure out how to fix a looming breakdown. There's an immediacy to my every moment, and I understand life as a set of probabilities that I have a meager ability to control or influence.

As such, the things I feel I can control are vitally important to me. Maybe I can't prevent my body from panicking about something dumb. I can remove myself from situations that beget panic consistently. Maybe I don't have a choice in my “dream job” and different goals to own my work are still a ways off. I still picked drug studies and living frugal instead of jumping head first into the “regular” working world. I know my disposition, while deliberately poorly understood, tends to rub “normal” people the wrong way, so I reserve my interactions to as many known friends as possible and stifle the urge to be drunkenly social to a few times a year.

Much of it can be summed up in simple sentences. I laugh with those who laugh with me instead of scowl and judge. If I had my own enterprise, pulling in even a modest amount I've already proved myself capable of, I can't get fired. If I keep myself working on tasks that don't require a measurement of my heart rate or dilation of my pupils, it really doesn't matter the coke-addled hamster in my gut as long as the task is getting done.

I speculate that part of my disposition has heavily drawn from all of the art and media I interact with. I'm the hero of my story. Everything is life and death. One small thing that you didn't even notice can set into motion a series of events that would fundamentally change the character. Whether my reality is massively changing or not, I remain ultra-sensitive to the idea that it can in fact change in a moment. Doomsday preppers come to mind. You might think they sound insane always talking about the end of the world, but you wouldn't hate to have their plan and resources in your life. I can go on and on about my dreams and want to create, but even if it takes longer than I'd like, and you get annoyed and exhausted with my descriptions of the journey, the stage is at least set.

Every single day can be the day. Every single moment. One inspiring line or point of contact can radically alter your existence. Do you want to be subjected to the kind of “randomness” that will throw you into someone else's story? I prefer intention. I prefer trying to prepare for better eventualities. You have to think too, “life” as it's understood as this context you need to survive in, does not want to be constantly changing at all. You want a stable job, partner, family, or TV show. Even your problems go down easy enough if you know they can be handled with a nap, a tool, or a pill.

When you acknowledge how the only truth is change, it can cause stress and anxiety. What are you changing into? What did you used to understand that's poised to turn you into a backwards FOX pundit looking super ignorant even when it's not deliberate and motivated? This is the nature of the anxiety when I choose a new “normal” job or have an opportunity to fight against something I think is dangerous to the health of society at large. There is no distinction between reality and what it is I'm making of it at any point. I'm always at once seemingly contradictory things, and whatever choices I make in service to smoothing out those contradictions. Faith without works is dead? My idealism might be tempered by reality, but I, and everyone who thinks like me, are better off when we don't have to work at the expense of our rights and recourses.

People want to argue these gun-control kids came out of nowhere. No, they stand on the backs of piled up dead kids and disregarding sentiments of greedy personality disorders. Your “stardom” or “pioneering leadership” or “challenge to the status quo” is not the ten minute story with a bow about being a self-starter, reading the right books, or donning the proper pedigree. It's the every day habit and thought process that pushes you to do more. That's not most people.

Consider, even people who think of themselves as “moral enough,” will do “extra,” but not necessarily “more.” You're a teacher who doesn't feel they are getting paid enough, and your struggle bumps up against your desire to help your students. So you spend your own money for more school supplies. Maybe you raise a concern to a school board member. The more that's truly needed though is what was done in West Virginia. I guarantee it was a small subset of teachers who organized and promoted to give everyone else the excuse to sign on. So it goes for marches and rallies in general. To simply agree, or suffer in solidarity, is never and not enough. For those who don't consider themselves heroes, that's all they'll amount to.

Can you be a hero without a destructive ego? The most relateable tales, from ancient history to now, show even the Gods suffering from their oversights and flaws. I think a healthy ego is simply one willing to accept the consequences. I'm prepared for angry attacks. People who organize know the “entitled” and “immature” comments are coming. Being someone of consequence is by default a threat. You have to work and prepare for the fallout. You have to imagine the next ten steps whether your plan works, and especially under the assumption that it won't. This is a lot to ask of anyone, which is why it only happens under those who ask it of themselves.

So I genuinely have to worry. To what degree am I allowed to tip my toes into the waters of “business as usual” and still maintain my focus and desire to change as necessary any moment? How comfortable am I allowed to get, financially or socially, playing their game? What's the balance? When there's no hard rule to tell you, you're locked into worrying about the details. The flurry of unknown details and lack of experience trigger the parts of your brain you hope are prepared to cope.

The question is never about “can” I accomplish or play along or succumb. It's whether and why. It's asking what the larger context is and making escape plans. You are a context embedded in contexts, and retaining an understanding and road for your decisions that transcend the contexts you don't like or want to see perpetuated into the future is what makes an individual. My personhood is under attack, and I don't want to be unwittingly attacking it because I got too tired or overwhelmed or persuaded by some excuse offered from someone who's too comfortable. I've attempted to condition myself to react pretty viscerally to what I perceive as throwaway advocacy of my death.

My brain is a black hole of ill-describe self-refutation in the mind of anyone who's under the impression they've figured something out. I doubt it. I doubt myself. I doubt my best and worst decisions. My favorite moments will be followed by inevitable tragedy, just like every delicious meal begets toxic waste. I'm harder to understand the less attention you're willing to pay to every single thing you do. The more words you let slip through the cracks. The more shoulder shrugs you offer, not because you don't actually care, but because you're unable or unwilling to prefer in general, the more adrift you'll be. The only reason I'm as “stuck” as far as “society” has let me, is because my singular will cannot combat collective complacency. And when that collective doesn't care to pay attention to just what it is their words or lack of action contributes to, then everything has to ride hopes and prayers until a march or tragedy “spontaneously” pretends to be of larger consequence.

I don't want my life at 49 to look like it does at 29. I don't want to hear the same bullshit in the news. I don't want to read catch-all anti-reporting nonsense about preventable struggles of “Gen Z” or how general ignorance fuels harsher conditions from runaway climate change. I don't want to be stressed out and depressed that, “if I had only tried to do it as I knew I should have,” maybe something would look measurably better today. If I had only spoken up, or fought, or sacrificed what now would seem like so little. It matters if I more hate than enjoy each day. It matters if my thoughts are consumed by whatever task is overloading my system. It matters that I know the details in trying to navigate my context and run my game across all others. It should matter to you too. It should always be prepared to change in ways you're stewarding, not just subjected to. Being anxious or stressed about that isn't a wrong or a disorder. No accomplishment or dollar amount is an excuse to stop.

It's taken me a long time to even figure out an approach to “balance.” Part of the reason I take in vast amounts of disparate sources of potential inspiration is because it's very real to me how much of myself I've “lost” or tried to mold into something more respectable and manageable. The “extremes” I go to in trying to accomplish something are a large story that's always working its way through my being. I had to make the case that watching TV or reading comics are worthwhile things to do. I had to persuade myself that “a little each day” is actually a good thing, be it addressing a craving or nagging sensation to do something that suggests your priorities are in order. I literally got a call between this and the last sentence to do some construction work for under the table cash where I might learn something or meet someone useful down the line.

Having that kind of “freedom” to experience things, like the freedom to pick up free stuff on Craigslist, is something I enjoy and helps me in random ways. It's worth it to keep asking yourself if the benefits of something new or safe outweigh other perks. If I was getting paid a ton so I never had to think about salvaging free things, the math of what matters in my mind changes. If I can afford the plumber, I don't necessarily need to learn how to be one. But, if I want as many accessible skills to be as useful as possible over time, maybe I want both. Just like simply because I can play enough instruments to make music or impress, doesn't mean I don't want to create more or better or become competent on others.

I don't know that I see balanced lives, if only because I never much hear what people aspire to. There's at least a broken balance between the life being lived and the life being striven for. I see people get the kind of job I'm about to take, and then “make it work” or “love the grind” or overburden some positive aspect. I don't want to get lost in those woods, so I'm willing to keep talking about which way my compass is pointing out of a healthy fear of looking too normal.

[703] Well, Come

I'm restless as fuck. I can't focus. I'm flirting with some impulsive feeling to just do something shit. Or, more, decide to behave in a shit way. I'm concerned by how easy it was for me to get a job. I don't like the ready-made structure lined up as my destiny after a concerted effort over the last 7 years to avoid it. I don't want this. Moreover, I don't want to persuade myself that it is what I want. I'll learn it. I'll find a way to profit from it. But it's just going to exercise my tools and perspective to a more deliberate opposite-direction-I-want-to-head direction.

I say that knowing full well I don't have much of a direction. The direction is a feeling and impression. It's a sensitivity to the thoughts that beget more and more thoughts that I don't want. It's a shift in my disposition and what I allow myself to justify saying or getting away with. I want to rush to accept the ludicrous terms and conditions and work at Clustertruck all day tomorrow. Why? Because an overwhelming wave signifying “nothing matters” is washing over me. Who cares about sticking up for labor if I could stand to make a couple hundred dollars the next few days? Who'd bother organizing and speaking out when it will land you, always, on the defensive?

That's what this is. I'm in my fallback. When everything I wanted to do entrepreneurially failed, I was supposed to get the “real world job” and be a “mature hate-my-life” kind of adult who said the words “taxes” and “mortgage” slightly less often than “traffic.” I could politely chat around the water cooler about Stormy Daniels or how that new show looks really good. Every cliché detail you could add to an environment like that I've never framed in anything less than a kind of nightmare scenario.

And of course I'm overstating it. Of course I'm of no measured mind that wants to find any redemption or appreciation for my place and opportunities because this isn't a ya ya sisterhood retreat where I imagine we hug our problems tight before letting them go on a homemade candlelit craft. This won't be any better or worse than everything always. But it is something that I've, for many years, conditioned myself and cautioned myself against rejoining. This signals to me, right or wrong, a lunge backwards.

Perspective would bother to remind me that, I'm not chained like if I had a mortgage or family. It would remind me that I “click on” when there's a human component to engage with and distract myself or talk to. The Law and Order stuff on TV will be my day to day. That's not only exactly my humor and morose sentimentality, but “normal” people find that stuff compelling and interesting. I'm poised to load up my “interesting tidbit” bank.

I'm also stepping into an environment that is habitually understaffed, disorganized, and filled with people with some form of nagging do-gooder or guilt status that craves levity and leadership. I will see holes. I will see ways to make more and more money. Maybe, just maybe, I'll discover something important about myself and the “reason” I found myself on this doorstep at this time. I suppose, having said that, I'm just disappointed this is one more thing that played out exactly like I thought it would. The degree I didn't want, got me a job I didn't want, in a setting I'll probably do fairly well in for more money than I'll immediately have the time to spend or know what to do with. God. Dammit.

I'm going to be most disappointed when I do the work, make more money than I ever have, endear myself to the crowd my childhood conditioning taught me to, and STILL get everything I actually want to do done that works to spite and shun the whole endeavor. Oh, you have a NORMAL job and can't find the time or will? Did that shit. You can't find the time to keep abreast of the arts or catch a show? How close am I to traveling at the speed of light, cause we must not be scooping from the same time bin. Oh, you're depressed and anxious? I ain't seen your 10 page 3-part irrational panic attack and dozen depressive sentiments try to preclude the efforts in service to your day.

The more I act like you, the more vicious I'm going to become. I don't look forward to that. The more I have every liability, every familiar comedian reference, every when-did-that-start aching body part, and I STILL keep the dream alive and know the real goal and mode of being on a perpetuating best-lived kind of day wheel, the glaring hole at the center of your being will swallow me up. Part of me wants to construe my tax debt as a sympathy pain to everyone with student loans, but even then, 2 months of working like I do would pay it off.

Even if it's not precisely a step backwards, it is a step sideways. As I'm on the verge of getting power out to the land, less than a day of dry-walling, and figuring out where my toilet is supposed to flush to, I'm getting a real job? And I'm getting that job because I self-sabotaged the job with all the leeway because the idealist in me knows the sacrifices I was making in service to it weren't exactly adding up. But now, I could work “normal” people hours, and make the same money, or likely more, and use my weekends to work on the land. My paycheck isn't eaten before I make it. That's the key. The mode of living and work I've done before this point still count.

I'm worried as well that the job will make me even more the wrong kind of selfish. I feel up my own ass enough without glombing the culture of “overworked and underpaid.” With the high school dropout work culture you get relationship issues and drug problems. With the “middle-income” crowd it's everything ever referenced while making fun of white people. I know I don't feel as though I have much of “a people,” but I know damn well that those are not my people. Jaded seen-it-all-before types are one thing. To be one, and never think there's an escape for you won't cut it.

As I was annoying friends to write me up as professional references, one told me, “Welcome to the system!” I get the sentiment, but I'm nothing if not a product of the system. The school system. The capitalist brain and motivation suck system. The broken nuclear family system. Hell, the “personal brand share all the time” system as I work through every stupid detail of my illusive mythology. You know what I'd rather have? A system of cooperation and calculated risk. A system that extols the virtues of an engaged life. A system of mutual trust and respect that makes it so your first instinct isn't to be exhausted and put off or angry when presented with something new or unexpected. The world at-large is not going to give me what I need, or change my definition of having a life worth living, no matter how good I get at it or money I make from it.

So I hope you don't treat me differently. I hope you don't think this is me “maturing” or “accepting” that my way doesn't work. Like every negotiated act of compliance, this is the bad needing to be translated into something good. This is one of those last few remaining chains on the road to self-sustainability. This is a calculated risk weighing the consequences to my disposition and mental health. It's still just getting by and making money, which are required, but aren't the goal. I hope you can consistently feel better about whatever it is you're doing for money and where it's taking you in life.

[702] The Catch

I am a creature who has been molded. I think this is such an amazingly important insight and admission that we collectively forgo in our understanding of the world and ourselves. “You” hardly exist. You can throw together all of the physical ingredients you want. You can appeal to metaphysical nonsense to describe your spirit. You can point to the story of your individual past that you believe looks nothing like anyone else's. And yet you are still controlled and described by things so beyond your control and outside your awareness, it makes me wonder how an “ego” ever managed to evolve in the first place.

As a molded creature, it gives you varying degrees of leeway in taking responsibility for your actions. I think it's significantly easier to be an adolescent or just transitioning into an “adult” for you to recall moment after moment where you didn't feel you had control. Parents or school dictated something. Your hormones drove you crazy. It was your first experience with an illicit substance or you'd never seen enough of some show or interpersonal scenario to be bored to tears. While no one wants to admit it, if you took a functioning alcoholic who knows how to drive home drunk everyday, and hasn't been in an accident for 15 years, he's arguably more responsible than the teenagers who might try to do the same.

What makes that above example difficult is what I refer to as an “either/or fundamentalism” that haunts all discourse and infects those who don't critically think or comprehend slivers of important differences. An either/or fundamentalist, never simply says, but screams, “Drinking and driving is bad! It will get you killed! It's irresponsible!” They're born into a time where .08 is the rule, and never knew any different. They got the school PSA and targeted commercials. They might have a deeply touching tale of how alcohol affected their life personally or in their family. And ultimately they'll be making a conservative appeal to the cultural lawful norm.

The person who watched their uncle not only climb the ranks at work, but manage to have a loving family, and never get a ticket, let alone in an accident, is going to know that there's at least one person who can do this whole drunk driving and life thing better than the average duck. I'm not saying we should create rules in service to the one person who can do it differently, or better. I'm saying every attempt to codify life and delineate acceptable modes of behaviors has lines and exceptions. We routinely pretend they don't, but nature is probabilistic, not fatalistic.

The way to describe this is to just call it, “the catch.” Gun violence is hot right now, kids marching in the streets, change coming around the bend. The catch to rah rah motivated ignorance on the reading of the 2nd amendment? Dead kids and extremely weak and hateful professions from rich white pundits. I'm proud of these kids, and I hope they get what everyone wants. Will it come with a catch? Of course. They're getting attacked personally. They're kids, so if you listen to the wrong ones speak for too long they start to sound like dumb kids. This isn't something I'd belabor them for because everything said on FOX is worse than the C and D-est of students might blurt out. But having a voice, creating a change, and taking responsibility at any level always has loose threads that will catch.

Age has forced me to confront the catches that came with my idealism. The world, for most people, seems to “get by.” People are engaged in what they don't understand, for indeterminate amounts of time, around people they generally dislike, and occasionally drinking or a safe space is created for them to pretend to work through the cramps of their existences and neuroses. In general though? They're meeting “professional” and “polite” versions of what I like to say out loud. They're bumping between self-involved and precariously placed balls of fear and insecurity who've hollowed out a place within to keep bothering at all.

These husks. These nodes. These “masses,” were conditioned. Someone took their imagination and future in defunding their school. Someone polluted the air so they'd get sick and sad. Someone voted against measures to take care of them, and give them options, and ensure the future of the species was in the right hands. Their parents might've mistreated them. Their brain might genuinely have something wrong with it that ensures they'll never breach a level of understanding or reach a “baseline” example humanity might consider healthy. From the socks they wear, to the songs on repeat in their head, more went into crafting them than a million allegedly intentional decisions over years is going to erase.

I say all of this as someone who tries to be intentional. I try to account for and describe the background that is so consistently, so reliably so despotic and angry to how I've been molded to respond to the world. This whole exercise, the vast majority of people HATE it. They hate the idea that you might speak at length. They hate that you might believe or arrive at something through the annoying process of sitting down to think it through. They hate that you have more reasons and evidence and direction, and they hate you even more when they can't see it or understand it. They hate your tone, your examples, your metaphors, and your word choice. They hate that you tried. They hate that they think they've thought all this before! And where do you get off telling them anything, asshole? And they don't accept that their hatred is as conditioned as much or moreso than the environment they'd maybe like to escape where they didn't need to hate so much or so often.

I'm a deliberately challenging person. I know the language of politics and body language. I know how to look and sound the part. I know how to point my language to mirror what I think is your intelligence or interest. I know, to the letter, to the word, the difference between “rambling” and “ranting” and a diligent exploration of an incomplete or ongoing idea. I've written research papers, and while extremely drunk. I've endeared myself to hundreds, and provoked “get help you idiot” in a thousand different ways. The point being, in our interaction, I've already taken responsibility for what I said or how I said it. Why do I know how you're going to respond? I don't know you personally, I just know there isn't someone there. I know the environment you're responding to, because I've been incredibly molded too.

The catch of being deliberate is that nobody can tell. People use the exact same words in the exact same scenarios, irrationally, in a panic, when they're projecting, when they're feeling insecure, and when they're lazy as are afforded to you. And just because you're trying to be deliberate, it doesn't mean you can always stay that way all of the time. You'll get tired. You'll slip up. You'll fuck something up in a magnificent way that calls upon the God of Comeuppance to embolden the smirks of your critics. Think you're smart? There's a list of every stupid thing you've ever said or done in someone's back pocket. Think you've figured something out? Who better to come into your life than the guy who always knows just enough more than you to try and make you feel bad about it.

We have a “competitive” capitalistic culture. The roots of our competition are literally inherited tools to mete out life and death in a violent and confusing environment. In a blink of an eye we're expected to get educated, keep up with the world of creative endeavors, and emotionally regulate? The comment sections online didn't happen in a vacuum, because the people writing them didn't develop under anything less than masked violence and death of one measure or another. Death of their ideals. Death of the concept of a healthy family or dreams. Death of an ability to appreciate their own place in the world or ability to be of any consequence in it. They don't believe the negative consequences anymore than the prospect of positive ones. They don't see a catch, because they don't know they're the living embodiment of one.

So what do you do with the catch? Do you want to turn to a self-help book that lectures you on “grit?” Do you want to give up and rot in your meaningless existence as you fire up the video games again? Do you want to rest on your laurels, also conditioned, for enough kids to die or disaster to strike before someone gives you an excuse to make a sign? It's not clear what any one person will do in response to the inevitable catch.

I build it into my personality. I can play politician, but I'm not one. I can speak what you consider to be wildly inappropriately, but it's serving my purposes. I can let anyone willing to honestly inquire or share in my motivations. In these times, to individuate, is to breath. It's to pause and listen and ask questions because you're recognizing that the neurons aren't firing and connecting like you might really want them to. It's to swallow the hard truths of what our environment is doing to us, and, if forever modestly and practically hopelessly, try to do better. When the “haters” and “crazies” talk ad nauseum, or even take over your government, you step back. The fix isn't to be like them with an illiberal drumbeat of incoherence. It's to understand and modulate them. It's to take control of your base tribalism and instincts, and move the ball around the field before you take a shot on goal.

I'm literally trying to develop different fields. There's a field to build and play with things on. There's a field of people I'd like to be able to talk to and rely on. There's fields of interest where I want to be in the loop. There's a mental field I want to romp about that allows me to persist in my goals and interests without too much fuss and distraction. The unifying point and understanding that belays them all is that it's deliberate. I talked it out. I wrote about it. I ran experiments trying to do it differently. I continue to question the degree in which I should engage at all or in one area over another. It's work. It's time. It's necessary, and it's worth it.

Ru Paul recently on The Daily Show said he realized a long time ago he couldn't change nobody's mind and if he gave a shit what people thought about over all these years, he wouldn't be sitting there right now. His sentiment is one I've struggled with for a while, because I conflated it with what I considered the “bad” kind of selfish. I think humanity has big looming threats that need more attention paid to them that we'd rather offer to a TV show about cross-dressing. Can you revel in the light of your “best self” that cares to indulge like that, watching or participating, while the ice melts or insane people hint at nuclear war? I have a hard time not adopting my piece of the collective stress we should have about that. We should be able to do both, not give a fuck about “haters” and advocate from our platforms or indulgences on how to do it better, but that's not really what I see.

I see people in their “attitude realms.” Once you're the “other” or “wrong” or “stupid” there is no redemption. Catch the wrong first comment on a reddit post? Here's a hundred upvotes to their damming sentiment about you. Provoke someone's resentment over your subject matter or tone? A self-righteous environment who didn't come here to be challenged or read revolts. Forums are this visible micro-chasm of the sea of influence we operate offline, and you can watch it play out in real time, and you can still not be persuaded that your mood and attention are hardly ever your own.

You should just know that you're never woke. You're never right. You should never be comfortable. You haven't figured anything out. You can't fix things. And when you try, you're automatically fucking something else up, even when you aren't aware of it. You can be like me, and be bored with the response you decided to actually read from the world, or you can react. You can be “surprised” shit begets shit, or you can build the shit into your disposition and prospects. Feel all day. Feel and react and be a normal human, but don't think anyone has a clue to how you respond to yourself besides you. Don't let yourself off the hook if you absolutely know you've no right to indignant condescension by starting the “conversation” with “fuck you, idiot.” Maybe you meant it. Maybe you're just at another peak of the endless hateful wave from your survival system being co-opted by forces we don't much understand.

I may not care what people think, but I care why they think it. Empty insecurity won't persuade me to change my approach. I can distinguish between projection and valid criticism. I have the patience to dissect line by line or word by word if the truth springs forth from the bottom. “People” or “the masses” or you when you're too tired or lazy or hungry or hurt, do not retain that capacity. So try silence. Try again later. Try to figure out the catch before you hand yourself over as the catch to someone who's bothering to try harder than you. You're not going to, because that's the catch of advocacy, to betray your naivete and provoke the opposite response, but you can't rob me of my deliberate understanding and decision to appeal to those better than you. And in never allowing yourself to acknowledge why there are those better than you, you'll ensure the environment that molds us all is mostly dictated by the mediocre sea.

My voice and accomplishments are destined to fail, but at least they'll be mine as far as I was willing to look for them. Catch.

[701] I Just Wanna Live

This is a thought experiment blog. I don't think it will take long, but I want to force my perspective into something that seems to hold enough of an appeal that my mind keeps returning to it.

What if I kept it simple? Right now, I don't have any debt because taxes don't count, could keep my electricity bill to the cost of running air conditioning, a water pump, and my computer, and could drop every notion of what's “right” or “just” and work my stupid exploitative job 2 to 4 days a month just to keep things basically paid.

What if I waited an entire year during my #yearofeveryday before I bought something that wasn't absolutely necessary? What if, while I have my list of things I want to accomplish each day, I double it, and truly go for it as far as entertaining an aesthete posture with regard to the things I enjoy? What if I stop pretending I'm keen to spend money traveling without a baseline degree of comfort or advanced bill payment? What if I knew my plan for the next few months was to wake up every morning and inch by inch dig up every sapling, adjust the grade to improve water flow, and eradicate every last hiding place for a tick?

What if I took every sentiment about my level of happiness or comfort as paramount, and just believed it? What if “the world” was no longer my responsibility, so that while I'm reading a book or watching a show, I'm released from thinking there's anything more that could possibly be done? What if I construe a notion of the universe so all-encompassing, it's not just the obvious thing I should be doing, but moral as well. I'm one iteration of an infinite array of iterations, I just happen to be in one where I went this far, and not much further.

What if I figured out how to just focus on my body and worked out constantly? What if I tracked my progress through practicing instruments and made little “look how cool I am!” videos by the dozens for people to enjoy my road. What if everyone I met, I, better than you've ever seen me do it, jump into an amazing level of genuine enthusiasm for whatever they're doing, and never have another disparaging word pass my lips? What if I become the best cheerleader for life in general after I've crawled so far up the ass of mine?

I had a perfect moment today. I had an album on in the background, I was mid chapter in a classic, I was comfortable, I was alone, I had my guitar set up in front of me waiting to be played, and I had by whole constitution oriented towards bringing order and accomplishing the tasks I had laid out for the day. I thought, “Everyone should feel like this. Everyone should be like me every day.” It doesn't take much. Books are cheap. Music is free. Being alone is standard operating procedure. I could “just be” as many moments like that as possible, and let the rest of the world go insane. No one's favorite part of shitting is wiping their ass, but it has to get done, and that's what I could reduce my job to. The bare-ass minimum.

It'd be a little like going back to when I was a kid. Just focused on what I want to do, not what anyone's asking of me, and not anything I've bothered to ask of myself. Could I be that person again? For a year? For as long as it takes to forget how to be anything else? The business of basking in perfect day after perfect day seems it might pay handsomely. Perfect it what's absent. Perfect in what to expect.

[700] The Tear Down

After you break; after you reach a level of sorrow, pain, or paralyzing fear is when something hits you. Jesus had to die and resurrect. Hercules had to dive into hell and fight to come back. Addicts profess hitting “rock bottom” before they take the first of 12 steps. Runners describe a “high” from pushing their bodies through the pain. Whether you want an ancient parable, or modern catechism laying out the value of abject struggle leading to awesome if not immortal reward, there's plenty on offer.

It's with this sentiment in mind that I often think that I haven't struggled enough. I'm loath to admit “real problems” in the first place. I'm wired to irrationally panic, talk, and write before I even remotely bother to calculate what's coming next. Whether it's the goals I have for my land, or the principals I'd like to defend, I think there's a case that the “right” kind of struggle hasn't been engaged, and it's as plausible as any an explanation for things as a claim to the generalized indifference of the universe.

For me, it happens with certain authors or with phrases that come out of nowhere. What I fear, what rests in my chest besides the cool air of this snowing spring day, is being right. I want more than anything to be wildly off the mark as to what I both feel and think is in store for, not just the country's future, but humanity as well. I want the most depressing fictionalized accounts of future worlds to be fond parodies. I want every depressed or dead literary genius to be suffering from the same undiagnosed subspecies of egoism. I want the “most telling” and “consequential” descriptions of the doors closing out the light to be a set in a house of a million rooms.

There are consequences regardless of your approach to life, but the consequences of being right are worse. When you're right, you've made it impossible to believe that something couldn't have been done. You spotted the malevolent look in their eye the moment you met them, and yet your computer was stolen anyway. What gives!? You've studied in depth how societies fall or herd-mentality allows everyday normal people to be complicit in compounding waves of atrocity, yet people will insist you calm down and accept “the facts of life” or the circumstances you inhabit. But you're right, and you're suffering, and you're desperate to plan a workaround, and it doesn't matter.

I've said in the past that I don't get very many opportunities to “feel like me.” Some weird confluence of forces has to persuade me to lean in to my extroversion or dejected combative take on “hope.” To put yourself out there makes you a target. Besides the inherent danger of asking people to aim and shoot at you, it acts in lesser known or described ways. Millions of people could flock to you, and yet you're alienated. The circle is on your chest, not theirs. The words you used to whisper to yourself, or scream to a chosen few, are abused to literally every end, and particularly to one's you'd find abhorrent and opposed to what you intended. You're a repository for every resentful inclination a person may have felt against anything they don't live up to.

Every hero of mine has the same story. Every “justice movement” goes through the same paces and iterates similarly. I've heard every condescending and self-righteous declaration of my motives. When someone professes that, “you take the good with the bad” they don't stress that you literally don't have a choice, and the bad will be actively punishing you for bothering with the good, no matter how good, and the bad can jump straight to death threats. If I stand up for worker's rights as an embattled delivery boy, I'm “threatening livelihoods” and “salty” to the invigorated propagandized, and/or the harbinger of fate flowing from my worthwhile story and sacrifice in the eyes of labor organizers. I'm both, at all times, choosing to pop my head up or down.

My fear is that I'm right about all of the choices I haven't made for myself that I watch people make for themselves. It's the wildest extreme empathy has to offer. The relief! I constantly profess of choosing death, video games, or obesity. It's as duplicitous as I can ever manage. There is no relief to adopt the burden of giving up. There is no solace in tacking close to your isolation and indignity. There is no sustained power or value in exploiting your capacity for self-delusion and quiet complacency. I know, I've tried. I'll go so far as to say you're often not actively aware of what it's doing to you, but that's the point. It shows up when me, the guy who's begrudgingly consistent where it counts, “magically” becomes intolerable or negative when you can literally pair my sentiments across 13 years. Can you choose to not step on your dick for that long? Even my favorite authors have had things to recant, but with a singular concern for rooting out the truth as far as you can dig, absolutely.

Given that I don't know anything, by the time I feel comfortable claiming I might, it's hard for me to cope with what happens when the truth plays out. Be stuck skeptical. Be in doubt, always. AND THEN SHIT KEEPS COMING TRUE AS YOU THOUGHT! What a beyond bizarre state of affairs. Why, it could have been any number of a dozen reasons A went to B or C decided to D. But there you freakin' have it, like dominoes. No, maybe not every single time, but enough to be concerning. If the world operates with such regular and terrible consistency, what's my infinitely small window on that pattern going to do against the tide?

I think you have to blow up the moon.

The moon is the looming reminder that the sun is still shining. It took fundamental mathematical truths and the coordination of minds towards a singular goal to get there. It was once part of the Earth, now uncoupled, watching. It's a place to stash away that voice always flitting about our heads telling us things we don't want to hear. It's a place to throw our baggage of responsibilities when they're too heavy. It's a place of cold indifference with no ability to shine on its own.

The moon matters. Animals respond to it. Along with the stars it aides in navigation. It can be the perfect backdrop of a romantic evening. But it acts as an unconscious force, kneading the shores. If you're not paying attention, it can drown you. “What a silly thought!” Says the woman who's never fallen asleep on the beach.

There are many moons in many orbits around the earthen body you're using to perceive the world. The ebb and flow of their movement has real consequences. I only need one moon. I know when all of the things I don't want to say or all of the weight I don't want to carry are swaying, way up there, pulling me back and forth. Your moons though? Prepare the explosives. I know how yours make you dance because I'm intimately familiar with my own. It's not clairvoyant to read the words on the page. And if you'd bother to read about yourself, you might discover a way through your journey to hell.

I'm afraid I'm going to get everything I put my mind too. I'm afraid I'm going to open myself up to thousands of people and try to provide something that speaks to my values in earnest, and it will be something equally or stupider so that blows it up as I've always discovered. I'm scared I truly only matter to myself, and every selfish exploitation I've bore the brunt of is the “just” way of getting what you want in life. I'm scared that it's okay to be smug and self-satisfied and flawless in your judgment of other people and their motives. I can't stomach it. I can't slow my heart rate in thinking about what being convinced of that does to every ounce of my effort to behave otherwise. What I've clawed together so far, that I might have to sacrifice it for...for to fit...for to win...for a seat at the table...for people to like me...for the opportunity to sacrifice piece after piece for more connections or profit or timeline stories of my achievements and grandiosity that outpaces you. It's a fucking disgusting picture. It's a vain and decrepit joke.

I'm so fucking terrified that I'm not wrong. I can't cope with having the resources to be of greater consequence. I don't want to be like my heroes, beleaguered by idiots, getting into Twitter wars with the jealous and lazy. I don't want every instance I've typed “nigger” in a blog to send reporters to my ex's house. I don't want attention and praise. I want to work. Because whether I believe there's any point to life or not, work means something to me. Work never ceases. Work is the physical manifestation of what you actually believe, and evidence that your better nature can betray all of the stupid and confusing shit coming out of your mouth. Work is your immortal impression, and so you should be deathly afraid of not paying attention to what you're working towards. More important, you should bother being aware of whether or not you're working through!

I make decisions, but you allow them to matter. You lent yourselves to the parties. You helped pay for, unload and assemble, or took over for a spell at the kiosk. You provide the encouragement or “likes” or standing invitations to stop talking and visit already. How do any of us enable such a dramatic degree of deadly and hopeless decisions to matter more than basic decency? How do I just know it's never getting better, and there's no appeal, and no fix, and what I create will have bruises and scars from being punched and cut like there was never something! else that could be done? There isn't, is there? This is it. You can write about it. You can watch. But there's no one to help you get to the moon.

[699] Shame Over

In this 3-part series breaking down quasi-unexpected shifts in the direction of my life, I'd like to potentially explore some perhaps positive direction now that the errant panic got most of its due.

Part of me forgot that I set up my life for precisely this situation. With the cash I have now, and if I had to use a credit card, I'm good until around September. I should be able to find an odd or pointless gig before then, no? More to the point, the idea that an “odd” or “pointless” gig is all that would be available to me is something I find disheartening. As a lover of statistics and data, it doesn't matter how many times I read of the number of “career changes” people my age have been through, it still feels wrong. It will never matter how much room I give myself to fail or adjust to something new. What will always matter is what I perceive as the broken backdrop and general trend.

I'm, still, constantly looking out over traffic. The other day we watched Koyaanisqasi and the movie Human. Transported to scenes of thousands of people inhabiting high rises or living in abject poverty. Close ups into the eyes of equally complex and anxious and intimately involved and woven into their culture individuals. And yet I always find a way to return my attention back to me. I can't feel part of it. I can recognize humanity. I don't hate “the other.” I want, even the dumbest, people on the planet to have access to things and feel like their lives are worth something. But I always return to me.

I can't get the line out of my head, which means there must be more to say about it, “don't try to fight someone else's demons.” The things I want to create or provide would presumably be focused on doing just that. Try to alleviate the struggle for someone else that I didn't like going through. Try to instill the responsibility and make the call to action where no one else would. Show them how to do things because they're hard, because they induce anxiety, because you're deathly afraid of the consequences and are never sure you'll figure it out. But can that really be done, or do you have to live it? Do you have to happen upon someone who’s been through the same thing in order for any real message to get across?

What are society’s demons? Is it a list that ever ends? Is it possible to sum up as one big singular failure of thought related to responsibility or consequences that is the poison at the core of the human animal? I find myself going back to questions like, what is it all for? Why do I care so much? How do I reconcile a species, or at the very least culture, I see on the rapid decline, with meager self-sacrificing punches up? Why am I convinced that something, anything, eventually has to even out and make sense? And worst of all, why, if I'm not the special snowflake constantly plagued and bitching and testing and fighting with this shit, why in the ever-loving fuck is the only thing I ever see fucking memes and bullshit happiness photos? Why is it never, NEVER patience and understanding? Why is it NEVER experimentation or new calculated risks? Why is it NEVER cooperation? At least in my corner of the world. At least with the people I at one time tried to surround myself with.

All I see, time and again, is people running. People making excuses. People acting like just because death comes for us all, might as well be right now. Every opportunity to try. DENIED. Every offer to get involved. GET FUCKED. Every discussion trying to probe out the mangled heart of the manner in which we're living. STOP WITH THE NEGATIVE HARASSMENT ALREADY! Like we can't make decisions. Like certain things aren't worth sacrificing. Like our backs shouldn't feel up against a very specific kind of wall facing the sort of problem that fixes burst forth from our desperate creative desire to live.

For the amount of times I reference the anxiety that kicked me out of studies and that still traps me into thinking I'm never going to figure out problems after giving myself less than a day of even bothering to explore them, I don't say it out loud as often as it feels. I'm responsible for the world. It's my fault for when poor kids don't get fed. It's my fault we're in ridiculous wars. I didn't write the right piece and send it to the correct place to start changing minds and starting the right discussions. It is always and forever my fault. I got myself fired. I allowed the general business environment to get so perverse and exploitative that I provided every excuse for those dumber and weaker than me to adopt everything they needed to fight against themselves. I already allowed it, sometime, somewhere, in something I said or did, and the butterfly effect of reasons culminated in every time I want to cite my “out of control physiology” as the problem.

That's the wrestling match. I used to actually believe in what I was doing. I was nervous and skeptical as hell for my first drug study. I was asking myself constantly what the fuck it was I was doing. You couldn't tell that to my heart rate. Now? I see the entire world resting on my capacity to get into a study. I see the next 12 buildings on the land. I see the parties celebrating my effort. I see trips to the doctor or dentist without a care in the world. I see myself on podiums talking about all of the shit it took to get here, and how it's completely unreasonable to believe you can too without a mountain of help I'm here to provide. I see it all. I see it right now. I'm there right now. And I have no idea when or how it's going to happen.

When I went to do studies, just like when I first started to do Biolife, “it just made sense.” I wanted (x) amount of money and security, so I did the thing that was required of me. The future was even more abstract. The money was maybe going towards alcohol. Now? Everything I've been craving to do like a puppy who's pissed the floor in excitement IS RIGHT THERE! There is no several months wait. There is no paperwork or permission. Show up, get poked, sleep in communal room, pop out and get a fucking driveway! Build a property to rent! Fix your truck and start a new business! It's all RIGHT THE FUCK HERE! And I can't touch it!

This is my version of depression. I feel I have no control, but feel all the weight and responsibility. I'm to blame, and I'm just affected. That's it. It's just there, I don't know what to do about it. I can talk about it for days and never find the words. I can remember the happier times. I can recall when it was dramatically worse. But it is what it is. And I can wish and pray until the cows come home, and I'll still find myself scrolling the classifieds for an understaffed desperate department somewhere to trickle in funds as I navigate the hopeless aging overweight “adult” world of bureaucracy and complacency.

I don't think people stress enough that you don't really have as much time as you think. Especially if you go to college, I've had around 8 years to “be an adult.” What happens in another 20 if I can't monetize the land? 49 writing a teenage angst blog about how I should have figured something out by now? Lamenting I should have met “even 1!” person with the same kind of desires or agenda? Beating myself for still not finding the time to reconnect or visit friends, an alleged end unto themselves, because the timing and funds still weren't right? Yet, to talk of next week sounds foolish when your fate isn't in your hands, let alone the next 20 years.

That's the balance though, right? It's between everything you can't control, and the things that keep it in check. Working for someone else is fundamentally chaotic and insecure. No matter what, no matter where. You've given a huge portion of yourself and future over to whatever your endeavor is, and if you're not figuring a way to get the world from it, you've sacrificed your own. But in a society in decline, where everyone is doped up and sad or busy and desperate, what can you, another poor person provide? Moral vigor and inspiration like Jordan Peterson? Some new stupid gadget or toy? They don't want your space, or at least not yet. You give your useless ramblings away for free.

I want an escape. I want to sell everything, move somewhere poverty-level cheap, and run a banana stand. I want to be like the Kenyan guy I read about who had 500 family members he kept in regular contact with. I still have the focus and desire, but I've co-opted them towards shit like trying to pass the time across my interests more evenly? And then a house party gets thrown over the weekend, and I lose my shit job, so I blow up my routine after a week. It was pointless to start. It suffered a pointless end. What I learn, what new connections I made, all would get funneled into references no one I knew was familiar with and pretend to underlay projects I don't have the time or resources to start. One useless time-killing move after another.

“If I could just find the time, then I would never let another day go by. I'm over getting old. And maybe it's not my weekend, but it's gonna be my year. And I'm so sick of watching while the minutes pass as I go nowhere. And this is my reaction, to everything I fear. Cause I've been going crazy I don't wanna waste another minute here.”

“I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king. I've been up and down and over and out, and I know one thing. Each time I find myself flat on my face, I pick myself up and get back in the race. That's life.”

The last time I felt desperate, I picked up 2 jobs at opposite hours and proceeded, as I do, to work myself to death. I don't want that to happen again. I consciously pulled back on the hours I was working at CT, espousing the idea that it's still definitely not purely about the dollar amount as it is how and why you exercise your time. I have enough time to apply to several hundred jobs if need be. I have less reason to believe my car is going to die on me at any moment. I have leads. I have someone who's still supposed to contact me about starting something on the land tomorrow or Tuesday. I have shit I don't even want that could be sold if things got insanely desperate. I haven't even tried going back to Biolife, the thing that, at one point, actually paid my rent. I was considering looking for more work even while I was spending too much time at CT, so the ground floor mental place is somewhat established already. There's still an infinitesimal chance I enjoy whatever next thing I move into.

I'm going to try and prevent myself from feeling guilty about even mildly freaking out. I think it's okay to consider the world as resting on your shoulders. How else do you become someone for which it actually does? I don't think you have to love the struggle or grind. I don't think you have to make the picture sound rosier or more self-assured than you are. Let it sink in, I'm not even upset I don't have the job. I'm upset that exactly the thing that could or was bound to happen did, exactly as I've talked about, and for reasons that it should have. I've already been here, back whenever I've written about it, just like I'm already in my future. Even with the path laid out behind me, I still struggle with how exactly “I,” let alone “it” all played out like it did. Why I couldn't do better, but can imagine a million ways I could have been worse. How I watch every day how a million people are the million ways I consider worse, probably unfairly, but distinctly.

It's never getting better and I'm fated to feel this way forever. Precisely the kind of positive direction I should end this with.

[698] It's Still A Shame

I knew this would happen. I've spent several hours texting every past order number for the last 3 months this message:

“Hello, I was recently fired from Clustertruck for telling customers that when they “tip,” the first $2.50 of it doesn't go to drivers.

What this means if if you tip $0, a driver makes $4.50. If you tip $2, the driver makes $4.50. They want you believing we make “100% of tips” as the app tells you if you try to tip $0.

The effect on drivers is a loss of money for trips that take them across town.

The effect for the kitchen is tricking you into subsidizing what they pay drivers.

I've made several thousand trips for Clustertruck, as have many drivers who were finally pushed to leave.

I ask that if you order CT, you consider if that's a model you support, and for the drivers still there, I hope you consider tipping in cash, as it's the only way a driver can approach a living wage.

Thank you for your time.”

I suppose predictably given the vast age differences between people on a college campus, I've had mostly supportive “Thanks for the info!” responses, and a few “Fuck off, the food is lit, you're salty you're fired, it's embarrassing someone your age has a job like that.”

The reason I have to keep writing is because my stomach is in knots at what I think is the kind of “inevitable” regarding people and business as usual. I think it's a really fucked up lie and I want people to know about it, and yet I'm fighting off a headache and am anxious as hell. What I consider to be doing as the right thing is considerably more annoying and nerve racking than swallowing the bullshit.

I'm worried by all the people who didn't respond. I know “the crowd” tells itself a story about why they do or don't care or why they will or won't believe what I've got to say. The “silent majority” will get the food they like and have their own problems, and will be happy to forget that remembering to tip a dollar or two in cash makes a huge difference. Because that's the posture towards most if not all things.

I find myself empathizing with a phrase I hate. “If I can just reach one person!” I know one person potentially matters. One started talking with me about passing the info along to actual labor organizers. A few have told me they don't want to order from there anymore, and many have said it's a fucked system or they'll switch to cash. I got more than one person, and I don't know how big of an impact that makes, but it still feels important. It still feels worth the anxiety and pushing my luck at the job.

It's so easy not to bother. It's so easy to keep your head down. Or, it must be for everyone but me. The world suggests that to marinate in a corrupt and morally bankrupt behavior as long as you get something out of it is the right thing to do. I asked Byron the other day if he could tell me one thing that wasn't corrupted. There are individuals for sure. There are charities that ensure money gets used exactly as it's intended. But for every one thing that isn't corrupt or is “acceptably” and “pragmatically” so, you'll get a hundred thousand that revel in their deception. This world is either designed for the devils, or a dramatic and painful tale about the last few remaining angels.

Here I want to point out that statistics about things getting better or people living longer have nothing to do with what I'm getting at. If the core is rotten, there's no amount of decoration or upgrades that change it, and disaster is looming. That core is the fear that keeps you from taking any risk, let alone with your livelihood. It's the silence and even attack against an obvious injustice. Think about that. The linguistic landscape is so fucked, injustice is no longer obvious! I'm literally chastised for having a job in this era! I'm told it's “harassment” to work or own or want for more than the next insecure person to hear about it.

My head's gonna fucking explode. There's a book's worth of shit to talk about in what's been involved with this job and how jobs and expectations have deteriorated. I wrote about the bullshit of Steak N Shake when I left there, I've detailed how weird and inappropriate the drug study environment can be and elicited a “that was very interesting” comment from a study coordinator. The cab business was its own joke. The liquor store at least kept things simple if you didn't mind potentially having a gun go off next to your ear. Kroger was unbearable. What you might say about Showplace, at least the people that stuck around had each other's backs.

I suppose we return to the idea that I want what I've already had. I don't mind working nonstop, but I want to feel like it matters or there's some kind of equitable payout. I've felt that way in the past. I want to own what I do, and have been there. I've been in environments where everyone didn't hate each other or try to take advantage, I'd like what I create to act morally and fairly as well.

I know I'm the squeaky wheel. I know I'm different and “interesting” or peculiar. But seriously, it only has to do with wanting to do shit right. It's not weird to not want to be lied to or be complicit in it. It's not weird to want a living wage. It's not weird to want to have even relative security if your job fails. It's not weird to respect your time and try to pack it with as much of what you want to do as is possible.

Except, it is in a world where most are silent, or need to be provoked and encouraged like they're hibernating bears. It's weird to be like me if you don't consider yourself interesting or having anything peculiar about you. It's weird if you never bother to learn or don't care to define what we should consider doing the right thing is in the first place! It's weird to be me if you're “comfortable” living with 4 roommates your entire life, and not because you choose to, but because you'll never make enough money no matter how far you advance. It's weird if time is as burdensome to you as it is to me, but instead of engaging it, you smoke, or get high, or play video games, or work yourself to death, or adopt a different distracting problem. It takes so much more than anyone cares to fucking give.

So many people just give themselves over. They gave up and they don't even know what it is they gave. Maybe I don't want to be too friendly to the angry old man who has the same thing to say about the shitty job every day, but I respect where he's coming from. I know he's correct. I know he'll never be less angry without my help in some fashion, and if we're going to interact, it behooves us to figure out a real and proper fix if I'm to remain sane.

Anxiety might just be a too complicated word for fear. I'm deathly afraid of catching fire. My influence happens almost automatically and accidentally. What do I do with any real power? “Real power.” It won't be an immediate shift to see how I can fuck people with it at least. I won't pour over how to get one by a distracted and struggling public. But then, I don't really want much to do with the public. It's hard, if not impossible, to juggle so many people if they're unwilling or unable to take any responsibility for themselves.

Maybe the worst part of this whole thing is it fucked up my #yearofeveryday. I didn't exercise yesterday and didn't read 5 comics. I let myself get distracted and my head filled up with all the drama from work. The “structure” I had tried to plug myself into with a routine that included work and a relative dollar amount blew up as quickly as I tried to create it. My attempt at balance blown away by an insatiable desire to not be complicit. It doesn't even feel worth asking you if it was worth it. Your silence has always spoken volumes, and makes it all the more obvious to me why I have to put myself through the bullshit.

All of it, all of the time, is a lie. It's not a thing you can talk about, it's a thing you have to feel and force to transform you. Which lies are you going to accept? What's the acceptable level at which you can betray yourself? Every fiber of my being wants me out in the street with a megaphone declaring injustice, and I'm going to roast in my confusion and headache, lying to myself about how important or consequential I can be. Lying about looking forward to the prospect of another duplicitous job. Lying about ever getting where I need to be because I'm the only one playing my game, so there can never be a winner.

Fuck everything, why do I even bother?

[697] It's A Shame

Part of me wanted to sit and let what I have to say marinate for a little bit. There's a kind of chaotic satisfaction I'm trying to temper in trying to develop a plan for going forward.

I got fired. It's the first time I've ever been fired, and it happened because I refused to put my head in the sand and keep pretending the company I worked for, Clustertruck, wasn't lying to customers in order to steal driver tips. I'd made my appeals to management over the year I worked there. I delivered thousands of orders without incident. Eventually, I tried to compensate for the loss of money you take in going across town (sometimes 40 minutes to get back to the kitchen) and only making $4.50. The unwitting customer might've tipped you $1 or $2, but that money isn't realized unless it's in cash. This was a point of confusion and frustration for me when I first started, not understanding people were actually tipping, just not in the land of double-speak.

So I started telling customers on the far trips how they could be part of the solution. This translated into a couple of them complaining to management and, of course, construing my words into a some weak bitching about my job or “tip solicitation.” Neither of which were true. The person willing to spend $9-$12 for an egg and toast isn't altogether concerned for the plight of the a delivery driver, so the explanation I was offering was more than a little lost in translation.

I hated the job. It was as monotonous as any other. It was proud of its lack of obligation to its workers. It had many good and motivated personalities leave once it set in how they were getting particularly manipulated or taken advantage of. I justified it by trying to kill two birds with one stone. I drummed on my wheel or tried to practice my trumpet. I watched my shows, and I showed up an hour or two early to get reading done. I spent 80+ hour weeks to learn that true aggregate numbers of what you could expect to make there, and after 23 eleven hour days, you might finally start to feel like you can breath a little, as long as you're on SNAP, don't want health insurance, and nothing goes wrong.

I've so organized my life that I can weather nearly any type of employment and still keep my head above water, so what's at stake is more to do with my ability to look shining on resumes and pop into an “eager A student” persona during an interview. Turns out, my degree may actually be potentially useful for finding a job in a field related to family case management or children in need services. This area only explored because Byron clued me into the general hole these agencies are unable to keep filled, and the many people who can't deal with the “stress” of seeing the true horrors of what people do to each other or go through. ::yawn::

There's a larger issue though that speaks to the culture and psychology. In my appeals to try and improve working conditions, I was attacked by fellow workers. I've been texting every customer number in my phone who I delivered to the lie that CT operates under to “grow fast” and “disrupt the food industry.” Most are supportive. The PR team and different managers adorn befuddled looks and shrug their shoulders as they pay deference to “The Algorithm” impervious to common sense that could make the kitchen run smoother. CT is a tech company masquerading as a “fixer” and “innovative” food company. They merely invented software that obscure language and tries to figure out exacting metrics for exploiting its workforce.

But what they're doing is celebrated and persistently defended. It's a land where earnest concerns or complaints are forgotten and ignored. It's where, you're an independent contractor, idiot! is said without irony or reflection as to what they really means. It's Ooo-rah at the “company's success” when none of it will ever trickle-down to you. The hostility is one thing from lashing out insecure ignorant drivers. The silence and denial from those who brought the company, or ones like it, into existence is what kills me.

It's a general trend of people adopting the language and attitude of the “most moral” and “most efficient” which completely “disrupts” how people understand themselves or responsibility to each other. It's across industries and services. Schools aren't bad. Greed is. Redlining is. When you're racist and defund schools, or stash owed taxes overseas, you bankrupt how society functions. When you make a public good “compete” with a for-profit entity offered and available to a privileged few, you ensure society will continue in its decline. How many piddling faux-apologies do you hear from the owners of “gig-economy” apologists about the ground-level realities their drivers or couriers experience? How many people would “choose” to deliver food if good-paying jobs in their field were available all along? I don't want to spiral too far away from the point, but there's an entirely corrupted culture of what a “job” constitutes, your obligation to it, and what it should be able to provide that we willing hand ourselves over to, degrading the gains made my unions.

I spent the better part of a year in my car, in a parking lot, driving food around. I got a lot of watching and reading and playing done, as I did when I was doing drug studies, but I was/am still at the mercy of whatever morally bankrupt institution comfortable espousing the language of “business as usual.” Part of me thinks my subconscious will to not be a fucked up piece of shit again self-sabotaged knowing it was time to move on and put my back against a wall in order to figure out something new. I still firmly believe that just because everything around you is a lying piece of shit, you don't have to be, even when and while you're compelled to play along to a degree for practicality sake.

I suppose I again feel a measure of hopelessness because I'll never “escape” culture. It doesn't get better than feeding off the table-scraps of the self-righteously deluded if you're unwilling or unable to create something else. Co-ops that work exist. People who own their labor and earn to give are out there. There are charities who's money goes to helping instead of salaries. There are voices that remain morally sound and consistent after their camps turn on them. I want to be like those examples, I want to work like those examples, and I want what I say to remain true in spite of whatever consequences may come. Every time you give up an inch, in a way, you're giving up the whole world, and figuring out how to walk the line of what you “have” to do and how to manage the breakdown of the illusion seems a nearly impossible task.

The biggest part of me is most proud that I'm already fatalistically and dispositionally set for scenarios like this. I can remain “poor” for long enough to work at Wendy's (if things, dear god, ever got that terrible) and maintain the life I've established. I don't know what I'd do if I got fired or laid-off and had deeper obligations or debts. My concept of “progress” is what me and mine can create, not number of years or more sophisticated titles. And honestly, in the interim, perhaps there's much I could be doing as far as prepping the land or exploring options I never would pursue sitting and waiting in the parking lot. My mental environment has an opportunity to move on. 

I don't like feeling desperate all the time. Desperate to cling to something bad just because it's there and barely meeting a need. A quasi-reliable $100 a day isn't something to sneeze at, as long as you don't get too far into the weeds on what it means to procure it. But anymore I'm more desperate for sincerity. I'm desperate for a work ethic that's not making excuses for itself or how it operates. If your business model requires lies and exploitation, maybe that's not the kind of business the world needs. Maybe you don't deserve to profit any further. Whatever I create in life, it shouldn't have you thinking of 1984 as I insist I'm not stealing from the people I work with.

However desperate I feel, I'll never be so much so as the people who run, cry, or fight against the truth of what they're a part of. I need to live with myself, every day. I need to know that if I'm getting fired, it wasn't telling people to fuck off and throwing food at them in frustration, but because an easily corrected perceivable wrong was disrupting every level of honest communication and causing no longer tolerable strife. I want to be alive to keep the fight alive and not be a martyr for the cause, but if I have to go down occasionally for some reason, I can live with this one.

[696] Everyday Noise

This is an accompaniment to Everyday Whisper as I reflect on the first 2 days of attempting to meet the conditions I set out for myself.

I believe I misspoke when I said my life lacked structure. A particularly disorganized person doesn't show up to work as often as I do or build the things I've built. The impetus for trying to put an array of things to accomplish throughout my day is more of an attempt to induce anxiety for the right things. “Right” being things I enjoy and help take my mind off things verses things I “wish” I could be doing, but don't yet have the money or help.

I also included a few terms that are beyond my control. It's spring break. I'm not going to make anywhere near $100 a day, and even allowing the leeway for an average, it's going to take a considerable amount of time to even out. Something I'm okay with allowing room with is watching TV shows. That's always been a filler activity, not a guilt-inducing thing I never get around to or need to be in too particular a mood to do. If there's no business at work, I'd rather hang with a friend or run an errand than force myself to sit through 2-7 hours to “complete a season” so to speak. Also, the difference between a 9 track album of a genre I'm keen to verses a 24 track album of music I could take but mostly leave is a bigger time eater than it should be.

What my list doesn't include is arguably a key component to what's generally missing from my life as a social animal. A sense of community. A common goal and shared purpose. I don't make time every day to talk to anyone. I'm not devoting an hour of my day to playing a game or other group activity. If you don't want to pay to hang out in an adult sports team, or if you're not willing to play up your constant desire to get high and drill down on your insecurities, I've found this town to be a bit lacking in that regard. I can meet people, of course, I met 2 new ones tonight. One who nearly drank herself to death a few days ago, the other very high recalling woes from a recent ex-boyfriend. I don't begrudge people their problems, but I complain enough about life all on my own, and in my experience chain smokers don't revel at the idea of yard work.

A kind of run-off of putting different things I enjoy in new juxtaposing ways is that they become a little easier to remember. If I read 100 comics, I might recall a handful of details with a little prompting. If I have 5 in my head as I'm humming a song or recalling a figure from some article, it makes for a more unique experience. I also didn't expect to feel so good afterward, and in the morning, from doing yoga. I'm doing it very poorly, but my body is reacting to it immediately. I prepared so much food, and I'm feeling generally less hungry.

Create all the structure in the world and it won't give your life meaning. I get energy from doing things for people. More specifically, being of actual meaningful consequence towards people I give a shit about. A large portion of me wants to excuse my way out of this stupid and pointless set of obligations because I don't feel I have anything to prove to myself by adhering to “regimented indulgence.” If that was the only perceived potential benefit I wouldn't have started in the first place. I think it's important to state as well that I'm not sure I'll make it the year. Here and now is as much free time as I could ask for without study money in the bank and I'm still getting hung up on long albums and surprise invitations pushing my ability to complete the tasks to the late hours.

A general way I've been going about things is to wake up, grab my food, and head to the parking lot at least an hour and a half early. I read my book chapter. I read my comics. I start a movie. I play the album, perhaps drumming during it. Here, a giant chunk of time would go towards catching up on shows, but like today, there was no reason just to sit and watch TV with a friend around. I then came home to do yoga after seeing a show.

It's never that all together the tasks are that difficult or even take that much time. It's getting interrupted. It's getting bored. I actually want some memory of what I'm engaging with. I want to corral my focus. But I really want to be able to relate the things I'm doing to other people and their experiences of the world. I'm already on a different plain with the sheer amount of information I've taken in already. Now I'm going to add things from left field and create more mental connections no one's ever heard of?

I noticed as well that even if I can complete things early, this still presents the “wish” problem. Now my list is knocked out, and I'm wondering why there isn't more I could be doing to promote, sell, grow, build, or practice. I really do feel like a machine stuck in the on position. I learned how to jam up the gears during studies, but when you do things like yoga and complete lists and schedules, as a ravenous machine, it's like being a crackhead arguing for “just the tip” of the needle.

I've dealt with this is the past and I don't think it turned out like I wanted it to. I don't want to feel like a bright and healthy motivated person with nowhere to go. It won't be bad for me to reach Bannon-level yoga skills and I won't hate the surprise cool song I come across from the artist I'd never otherwise listen to, but I need less references than I do referrals. Part of me feels I'll stop caring about the in-between time energy once I actually have a house to do everything in, get organized, double down, and take it into the world in a manner that attracts the kind of community I'm after.

[695] Everyday Whisper

I feel if I don't write this correctly, I'm never going to be able to approach the task I've set out for myself with even the prayer of remotely completing it. The longer I linger on a fundamental question about myself, the more it sinks in the reality of the implications and hindrances.

I have what I think is a healthy fear of myself. I know my potential. I've proven things to myself time and time again. I know how I can arrive to just about any justification. I know how to change moods and mindsets. I know how to extract money whether I need to lean on illegal or immoral ways. I know how to earnestly practice. I know how to read all day. I know how to binge watch. I know how to meal prep. It feels like just yesterday I decided to “work all the time” in service to completing my house, and while I know I've watched a shit ton of media and made progress, from July until now March, it might as well be one condensed blur I regard as a kind of “sacrifice” of my 29^th year. The problem is that I've stated a number of times that I'm no martyr.

A good portion of my life looks the way it does because I've always been embedded in a structure. Every inch of your formative years requires waking up and going to school. Every assignment needs to be completed, if only poorly. If I wasn't forced to march in band, I wouldn't have any good or bad memories of it or an imposed perspective that's permeated my decisions and associations indefinitely. In a flash, your structure gets erased if you aren't keen to search and sacrifice to get plugged into another one. I keep thinking I'll get to “start my life” after a dollar amount or perfectly balanced budget. I look back on old messages about visiting friends or making plans that fell by the wayside because something “more vital” felt pressing.

Ultimately, my efforts are futile. Chris Rock's words come to mind in a piece of advice he tries to beat into his children's minds. Once you step outside the front door, not one single person gives a shit about you, and really, sometimes that's true about the people inside the house too. I find this one of those ideas I accept intellectually, but my body rejects in a fit of anxiety. My school structure reinforced ideas of what constituted good behavior and achievement worthy of reward. I got paid to read. I got the A so I could continue to keep partying. It “mattered.” People did give a shit about me, at least enough to punish me if I didn't do well enough.

But what is the punishment if you're “smart enough” to pay the bills and stay alive? What's the self-imposed selection pressure to become every inch of who you are? I try to be conscious of when I'm doing things out of desperation verses actively picking to engage with them. I do this so I don't end up picking up bad habits like lazily practicing an instrument and working against myself. I do this because I think we're sort of defaulted to a position of always trying to dig ourselves out of holes and are perfectly unaware of what making a choice really constitutes. I read through blogs dozens of times to figure out what kind of illusion I've weaved for myself to keep me away from my vaguely imagined “ideal.”

In my life, there are exceedingly weak standing repercussions if I don't do things. I've now gone so far as to orient my life in a way white trash or a junkie could support. If you can pay your bills via plasma donation, what's stopping you? It takes hiccups of effort to pay $100 here or there, resolve yourself to sleeping in your car, or work part time at a mind-numbing job to keep just barely above water. No one cares if I can play an instrument or 10. No one cares if I lose 30 pounds. I'm not headed to prison if I can't remember the brunt of a philosopher's argument or name of a character I've seen in 100 episodes. Reading 9 books one week and 200 comics isn't getting me an award from a librarian. Every single thing I do with my day is beyond meaningless to everyone but me, and I hate that idea so much I allow myself leeway to forgo all the meaning I could grant myself.

I think I've arrived here for a number of reasons that I don't feel right describing as “faults” on anyone's behalf. Whatever I am, I'm still an ape, and apes work best with a social component. Byron's sister came to town and we went out like the old days. It felt like putting on a perfect fitting jacket making jokes and pouring drinks and shivering for each trek between bars. Mild past grievances go up in joyous tipsy smoke. It simply feels great to be on the same page, regardless of what you're reading together. Now look at the other 364 days of my year, and I'm back to wondering what whim will swing me where.

I, of course, still have much to prove. I've concocted a gigantic narrative about myself and what I'm capable of. I reference my track record often. I still get indignant at the hint of condescension and lazy retorts. No matter how many “lazy” or “depressed” days I have to put away, I still haven't come close to abandoning a conception of myself at a fundamental level. But it remains hard to dream. It sucks to be humbled daily about all of the shit you can't control. It's sad and tired to report to yourself “progress” that always comes with a catch. I'm not motivated to buy more things, I don't want more time to myself, and I reject out of hand undue praise or persistent self-destructive indulgence. I'm terrified of the idea of “peaking too early” as if there's any reason to believe you can't always be progressing along some metric.

I think, without meaning to, I started to rely too heavily on “hope” despite my persistent condemnation of it. I should present an offering to the underlying ironic pulse of existence. I hope someone joins me on the land or wants to create something together. I hope I get a chance to give back and take care of in equal or greater measure to what I've been given before I die of a coronary from sitting too long or catch a catastrophic accident. I want to be right, desperately, so I make appeals in the dark to the faceless and voiceless amalgam of ghosts from my past who've helped shape me thus far. I started taking cues from likes and upvotes and nit-picking the vitriol at the heart of earnest imbecile commentators. I let one of my hands fill up with the shit of stress from over-working, under-organizing, and letting things I care about slowly die via mismanaged sacrifice.

I want to always be the guy who can start a coffee business in 3-6 months. I want to be the one who can reconcile everything with the right amount of alcohol, jokes, and mixed potentially difficult company. I want to watch way too much TV. I want to boast about things about myself that age thinks it won't have to rip from my cold dead hands. I want to know more details about shit you don't care about and things you're only pretending to care about. I want to create things you'd never imagine. And I want to do that because that's who I am, not because it means anything to you. I'm a complete and unrelenting asshole, and the nicest guy who's earnestly suffered in service to the people he's cared about. I'm fat and lazy as shit, and work more than people in countries who are killing themselves over the same amount of hours. I can set and meet any goal for myself, and write up a ten page compelling argument describing the relief and craving for death.

I've been living in one long hangover. I've poisoned myself with a grandiose dream, while perfectly achievable, by no means so in the short term barring an extremely improbable turn. The day after dosing I'm clamoring to quell the anxiety and guilt of my temporary embarrassment for my circumstances. But I'm not embarrassed. I'm disorganized. I'm alone. I'm incredibly angry. It feels like I already had what I wanted, and life construed itself to tear it apart. I had an amazing friend group that one by one gave up on either me or each other. I had the energy and time to bring people together. I had the resources to bring my ideas to fruition practically this instant. I had a place. I had help. I had a sense that I actually meant something worthwhile and important.

That's where the energy comes from. That's where the “reason” works its way into a positive feeling feedback loop. I don't mean for this to sound like I don't appreciate or recognize the people who have been nothing but supportive either. I never care to pit my despair against someone else's. But as the structure around me degraded, so did I. I retreated to a kind of street hustle. I looked for things to blame as I was tired of it always being my fault. I'm still tired of that. As long as it remains true, I need to reconfigure what I'm to blame myself for. I'm sorry I flirted with accepting your standards. I'm sorry I asked you for a reason, for you to want me to come around. I'm sorry that no matter what example I set I'm never going to think it's good enough. I'm sorry I throw my life at you like you give a shit. I'm sorry I don't care how you feel. I'm sorry I hang on to every fucking ridiculous thing I feel you've done to me. I'm sorry I'll never trust you. I'm sorry to be alive and bother trying too hard. I'm sorry for apologizing because I don't have better words for “I'm not fucking sorry and I don't give a fuck.”

I clench my jaw. I am wired tight. I get food handed to me 30 times a day, and I still jump when they come up to the window. I suspect that only way I'm ever going to “normalize” is by getting back into studies, and I still have only managed to think a severe acid trip paired with an anxiety inducing incident I'm forced to overcome might rewire my brain enough to bother trying again. I need to stop pretending like I even have a concept of “vacation” or want to spend money hanging out before a higher level of comfort has been achieved. I need to plug myself into a machine of my own making, reintroduce the butterflies that kept me going to pointless class, pointless jobs, and pointless social interactions. I've extracted all the value I could handle from that system and need to believe the dividends from what I borrow and improve on will pay out in even higher measure.

What does it look like if every single day I do a little bit in service to every part of me? I know what I'm capable of, but what's the catastrophic upper limit? What if I make a blood-thirsty show of my sacrifices of “hope” and “luck?” I can work, and manipulate, and learn, and play, and create all at once every day. I can do it “alone.” I can try and fail studies and go back to work the same day. I can have depressed indulgent days and still make my 30K a year and budget like I'm making 100K. I can keep in mind every person I've met who's done it or is doing it as well or better than me who I want to be just like, and I can watch myself transform just as I have into whatever you want to call me right now. I know where I want to go, and I know the very small number of things I can control in order to get there. I need to retain that control. I need to crave my future and not make desperate swipes at it while know-nothing hollow dogs bark in my ears. I need it to be the kind of difficult I know I'm the only one suited to overcome.

So let's kick it off. All at once, all the time, every day.