I think I just need a mild digression, as what seemed like a perfectly average day appears to be ending on a weird and impending doom kind of note.
I find myself not feeling “smart” anymore. I'm almost totally at the whims of circumstance. Consider how “dramatic” the shift in my life from “mere delivery boy” to “responsible adult” took place. Wasn't the smart thing to never have to do this? To never have to temper emails, ask stupid questions of even stupider processes, and play along? Yet here I am, trying to piece together the broken lives of broken individuals who find immediate reasons to hate me for even trying. And I don't even care about them.
I drove around a fair portion of the state today. One of my side-gigs, because you can never just do one thing and get paid a respectable wage, is tending to sanitizer stations and replacing ads. Everywhere I stopped, it was like a meager skin you apply to a basic character in a videogame. Was I just in Avon, or Noblesville? Well, Avon, the roads were paved and everyone was rich and old, so perhaps that's a bad example. The point of talking about driving, is that, again, I am traffic. On my way to spend my time doing nothing that important for nowhere near the amount of money necessary that has half a dozen ways of being done way more efficiently.
But this is what is asked of me. Every moment of every day it's the same. Just be normal. Just do the task. It doesn't matter what you think about it. It doesn't matter how it can be changed or fixed. It doesn't matter that your brain could be used for something more fun and engaging. You don't matter. You're a particle in the sea.
I don't know what to do. That's what bugs me the most. I'm alive when I'm engaged. I worked myself to death, several times, and I barely scraped by. I adopted the “real world” job, and it's everything and less than I could have ever dreamed. I keep my indulgences to a minimum. I make every call to every person anyone ever suggests or I can discover after weeks of hounding people, sometimes literally at random. I make appeals to the darkness of Craigslist. I put the smallest amount of trust in people to follow through to have it routinely go bad. I humble myself with all forms of work or now civic engagement. I put up with childlike dispositions and refrain from emotionally investing in the part of me that could burn so much down in an instant. I don't know what to do.
I don't want to reside here. I can't build my house faster, or make people get back to me, even while they're insisting they'll do so. I can't get paid any faster or keep students in town to order more throughout the summer. I can't run my car into the ground without coaxing some new long-term shitty consequences. I can't even guarantee I won't be back to sleeping in my fucking car in 2 months without taking a huge chunk of my cash and devoting it to some ridiculous living situation with random people perhaps. What am supposed to be looking forward to besides the prospect of losing money I barely, and still don't even, have? At what point do I just sell everything I have and join some commune that trades in berries while my money builds interest for retirement?
I'm getting as sloppy as the world around me. I'm adopting the last-minute scramble of idiots who can't plan or listen and letting it bleed into an image of myself I can feel I'm losing any remote control of. One of my feet has stepped a bit too deep into chaos. I still don't know what to do. Keep arguing with addicted negligent idiots? Keep showing up to video-chat meetings pretending an hour of my life is worth listening to a discussion of paperwork THAT DOESN'T EVEN CONCERN ME for 45 minutes? I'm actively pissing my life away while I operate under the glaring contradiction that I'm the “adult” who's “responsible” for being anything but a glorified taxi driver, secretary, and delivery boy all rolled into one, for a company that doesn't respect my values, literally cuts pay before I even begin, and is filled with boundless pride in their faithless mission.
What bugs me most is that I don't think there will be like a “snap,” so to speak. I think it'll be more like slowly laying into the accelerator from falling asleep at the wheel.
