[738] Empathy Hawks

It occurred to me that the extent of presumptions made under tribalistic tendencies is more pervasive than I care to generally accommodate in my daily approach to people.

When I reflect on the “poor” and addicted people I deal with daily, it becomes very real that most of the people who advocate on their behalf, or at least pretend to, in politics or perhaps online, aren't really dealing with these people. I'm as sympathetic to anyone who moves from one struggle to the next and can't seem to find a leg up. I describe singular moments or bad days as years of pain and waste more than occasionally. What isn't lost on me, and I fear what many advocates fail to understand, is that you can be poor and struggling and addicted, and still be a useless asshole.

The poster-children for the types that seem to care the most about how or whether we create and protect social safety nets, seem to be people who've managed to overcome their circumstances and want to give back, or people who are under the illusion their success had everything to do with them and them alone. The former run non-profits or local initiatives, in lieu or spite of larger organization or communication, the latter scream about entitlements and invent disparagements. The former plagued with an, in my estimation, over-active empathy system, the latter a simultaneously predatory and defensive actor.

I think about these people so much relative to myself and the kind of negative feedback I get with regard to my behavior or words. These “clients” are actively malicious. They'll beat the shit out of their girlfriends, routinely, and the entire family will look you in the eye and not blink when they describe what a sweetheart that person really is. They'll lie as though their lives depend on it. They'll fight about minor miscommunications. They'll pump so much sugar and cigarette smoke into their bodies their kids' teeth will fall out and they'll talk to each other like trash if they can't get a fix every 20 minutes.

Then The State comes in and says, “We'll give you therapy, we'll send you to addictions counseling, we'll transport your kids to several different locations all over the state and get them tested, we'll put them in tutoring, we'll help pay your bills, find you a job, and make ourselves available day and night if you need to talk.” Then they get entitled. Or perhaps, the malicious driver of the entitlement comes to the forefront, and lambastes any and all effort to try and make the situation better and hold people accountable.

It's a dramatic exaggerated circumstance, repeated in a dozen iterations, of my “difficult conversations” about friend group dynamics or behavior. In my job, if you're 10 minutes late to an appointment, it can mean getting you painted as an unreliable liar who's sabotaging time between mother and child and isn't sympathetic to the needs of someone in crisis. The person who referred you the case can turn on you or put a black mark on your company. It can be a grudge that pops up months later as a client screams at you over the phone. I can recall a handful of instances I ever raised my voice at an ex let alone got into any kind of notable fight with a friend, but examples will be used for years to bombard my character and as fuel to stoke the flames of my ignorance, intransigence, or malignancy.

Then I start to wonder, is it exaggerated? Or isn't it just the obvious and consistent impulse of the entitled empathy hawk? That is, how many times have you heard, “You're entitled to your feelings.” It imbues feeling, whatever it manifests, as tantamount to an inalienable right to be exercised with impunity. Unlike rights, you're born with as many convoluted and conflicting feelings as you can conjure, and there is barely the cultural insistence you have to fight or have part of you die in order to earn them. “You hurt me!” The charge rings unto eternity. Then comes time to employ “digging your own grave” the more you try to explore how or attempt to “make it better.”

That's part of the illusion we're operating under. From the lowliest client to our government writ-large. You can't make fluid blind pathology better. You can kill it, and it will act as a martyr for the dormant sense in us all that is tempted by its power. I keep asking myself why do the people I engage with all seem to have such small perspectives? How long do you have to live or lessons must you encounter before something clicks and change may come? How many drug tests that came back positive are you going to deny? How many plans are you going to make that you never intended to keep? How many times can you have the same fight before you try to make something better?

But those questions exist under the relative-delusion that things will, in fact, get better. That everyone, no matter their station or experience, has a concept of “better.” It's all relative to something. Relative to their basic grasp of language. Relative to the abuses they've experienced in the past. Relative to the pain you can't document during a visit. Relative to what they can see at all. And you certainly can't see what you're unwilling or unable to look for.

This speaks to my inability to fall too far down a rabbit hole condemning my behavior as damming as I've been portrayed. I'm pathologically proud of when I choose to be malicious. It means I felt you deserved it. It means I got a little high on the rage or self-righteousness. It means I got the rare opportunity to show you proof that I have lines and I was clear about what would happen when they were crossed. Politely attempting to engage in conversation and ask questions is literally never that.

When I'm met with open and ongoing hostility to the exercise, the problem is never me, in what I consider the most fundamental way. This isn't me calling myself perfect, nor is it denying that I can be excessively mean or rude. It means if you can't tell the difference between polite questions and ongoing conversation and FUCK YOU, I DIDN'T DO SHIT, I HATE YOU, I'VE NEVER DONE ANYTHING WRONG, I certainly can't address that, anymore than I can the addict who doesn't care I stayed later to ensure she got her full time, and ignores when she got high to blow off her previous visit.

This job forces you to be the “reasonable person” at all times. When you slip, it's like someone banged a gong for the ripple of consequences. You last by insulating yourself with people who engage the same kinds of people as often as you do, and know the kind of TLC, tact, and concessions to not damn the whole enterprise, and you, out of existence. Part of me feels like I shouldn't be seeing such a connection in the breakdown of my previous friendships with the behaviors of these people. A larger part of me says the “friends” who've fallen would think ill of me first and foremost before contemplating the abuses and addictions, if they acknowledged them at all. Does that seem right to you?

So then how do we, or do we even bother, assigning blame? I concede certain people can't be helped. An asshole is an asshole at any income level. I know the habits of patience and deference are things that need to be massaged and imprinted on me better, but my fuck ups are mildly mis-worded (for the workplace) emails, and disparagingly felt commentaries over social media. I don't blow smoke in your face and attack you for coughing about it. I didn't bring a child into the world who needs 6 root canals at 15 because of what I've been feeding it. I don't ever tell you things like, “A baby dropped a bottle on my face, so now I have 2 black eyes.” Wouldn't that be frustrating? If I gave you responses like that when you tried to talk about your feelings or how I hurt you?

On the spot, I can barely imagine what those kind of responses would even sound like. “You hurt me!” Well, every time I watched you cook, I knew you were waiting to plunge a knife in my side, so I just got out in front of it and squeezed your arm purple so you couldn't get me first! “You're not taking responsibility!” I've never even talked to the person you're referring to! How could I have slept with/insulted/made cry/pushed over a cliff someone I've never even met! “You don't even care!” I care about the environment and nuclear war, so of course I must care about you too!” Distracting, denial ridden, irrelevant, and paranoid. If I reacted or responded like that, I get it, monster in chief.

Is that how I'm read? Probably. When you take to a page to head-off your pathology, it's a fluid stream of potentially ridiculous impulses and sentiments. If someone needs a bad view of you, there's plenty. Take yourself into the real world and put on the “professional” face, even if you never fuck up, which is inevitable, but even if you never did, it's people imprinting their desires and insecurities and denials onto everything you do. There is no 10 or 100 second count. There are no other reasons.

Just like even when I call people unredeemable and an asshole an asshole, I can at least say “maybe.” There is no maybe generally allotted when we're making our harshest judgments and trying to make a conversation, or person, go away. There is no maybe when we fear the retribution of our in-group if we don't play along. Some people deserve a capital Maybe in a way others don't. We lose that distinction by entitling our feelings to placate being. You sow unreasonable doubt in the minds and hearts of who are otherwise your closest allies.

When I say things like, “I don't have hope,” or “I don’t believe in love,” it's underwritten by insights like these. I can literally do “nothing.” I'm not a “maybe” in the minds of people. And I'm not because I take responsibility for myself, and that's an easy and strong example to co-opt into something nefarious. “Haven't you heard!? He's already admitted the whole world is his fault! Get him!” It's the same self-destructive impulse, across mediums and examples, that attacks me and mistakenly thinks it's protecting you. I invert that relationship. Blogs pick me apart and with each one I feel less and less capable of fixing anything, let alone another person, or the world. But that's also the only way you can discover who you are and what you may do to in fact be of the right kind of consequences for yourself and others.

As I've also asked many times in the past, who really wants to empathize with me? I don't even want the shit I go through. I don't like seeing ten steps ahead, be it in some social game, or just the ways I'll breakdown if I don't begrudgingly continue to slog through life. I genuinely fantasize about when I'll finally get to close my eyes and not wake up anxious about how the day will shit on me. And yet, I'm still here. I'm still “even enough” spirited. I continue to hold a place of distinction at work and navigate new relationships and challenges every day. I can't count the number of times I've died. I don't know that this manifestation of my being is the 10 to a trillion trillionth iteration of multiple parallel universes. But I do know when I've lied. I do know when I've acted in bad faith. I do know when I've felt genuine affection or care and how that's tempered nihilism or fatalism and professions of hopelessness. And I know it is all bad, and all good, for an endless story of reasons. We throw it all away over merely feeling some sort of way about it.

[737] That Was A Hoot

Think I need a hodgepodge one.

Let's start weird. Maybe I don't believe in communication. What does that mean? It's something akin to a post-modernist point about “infinite interpretations.” I know I've probably said everything under the sun about communication, and of course it will never be enough, and yet as despotic fate would have it, it'll never be heard or read the same two ways by any two readers.

And at the same time, of course, we have as “objective” a means of understanding the world as science provides, and common narrative structures or timeless morality tales that resonate indefinitely. Aren't we communicating? Is there a semantic game here where “transfer” might not quite me “communicate” or “understand?” Is there more impersonal “information processing” or “data manipulation” terms that your senses and synapses can be reduced to?

It gets all the more confusing and more complete when I look at my relationships where I feel I have and haven't been understood. Purely selfish people seem to understand each other. More-sociopath-than-not seem to as well. There's a bluntness in a lack of emotionality that quantifies the capacity to be understood as more of a hammer strike than musical note. And still, you'll find people who enjoy pain more than a song.

If we run with the premise that communication is impossible, but something is transferable, replicable, or reliable, how would we go about finding it or describing it? We can go mildly solipsistic and say “I exist.” I'm writing these words, mostly to myself, so I'm in communication with myself. I have an all-encompassing narrative that describes “me” and “my” in relation to everything else. It can go as far as the words I know, or how I can configure them. I can type them as many times as I need. I can read them back and look for them to resonate. I can reliably account for the different states and phases provided I seek to pin down that something as earnestly as each moment seems.

Because it all seems. It seems like a catastrophe should get that name. It seems like there's timeless morality tales that should allow religious traditions to hold sway. It seems that even at our worst we're believing in something and churning through until the next iteration. There seems a fundamental ineffable “faith” claim to being, be it the endless story of the struggle to survive or the accidentally inevitable sense of consciousness as an end unto itself and its indefinite preservation.

What I don't like is after-the-fact justification. “Oh, I spent years in hell for this precise moment of clarity!” That seems very lazy and cheap, if not dishonest. I don't believe I need to spend a year doing social work for some insight at 70 that's going to make it all feel worth it. I don't think I need my shit stolen to humble me. I don't think I need to pick up a disease or destroy a certain amount of relationships before some “perfect” person or example comes into my life where I can finally apply the lessons and complete the puzzle. I think, if I'm communicating, attempting to better understand, or processing the data, by the only means I know how, I need to find ways to relate to or work with that information, and it's a measure of pure luck or probability that makes it fare better or worse.

What do I control? This. And this. And the ability to say “seem” instead of “feel.” And I can choose to read this over and over again until I feel some sort of way about it or think I've exhausted where to go. I've been complaining for months about not being able to find an electrician. Part of me knew my neighbor installed his by himself. I talk with him, boom, he offers to help if I get rid of the weeds so he doesn't get mauled by ticks. “You just gotta do it,” he says. An ethos I wholly agree with whose thread seems to keep missing my needle.

What am I communicating to myself with that? Certainly a measure of hopelessness. I certainly feel defeated even while I'm dreaming of the hours I'll be out there weed-whacking. Part of me feels like when my mind finally accepted the idea that my stuff was going to sit out there “indefinitely” was precisely the moment the other half of the universe said, “Guess we'll get to work stealing it for you.” In some magic way my inability to keep myself aware and believing made it so one more hole opened up and swallowed part of me.

What are these fledgling addicts communicating? They care? Their brain is no longer in their control? What do you make of people who quit things cold turkey? What do you say of the “enlightened” person who kills or ignores cravings to the person who might as well be watching a monster inhabit their body from the top of a hill as they destroy themselves one sip, puff, and lie at a time? I still don't understand not having a choice. A choice to view people through as many lenses as are afforded to you. A choice to couch your decisions in a structure of your making that butts against literally everything that would otherwise kill you.

Parts of me certainly feel dead. I don't know that they are, but they aren't helping me “just do it” unless it's a measure of my stupid job. I don't take pride in doing my bottom floor. I don't want to breed comfort. I've talked about that before. I don't want to submit more of myself than I've already done with my 20's to the half-completed “dreams” of what I thought I'd be able to do each week or where I'd be able to go. I saw another statement from a guy who's part of some gaming company with a recognizable name talk about being disciplined. He eschewed the idea of “motivation” and said to just train yourself to do what you need to do each day. I think both his and my neighbor's sentiment are incomplete.

Again, you don't need to understand anything, communicate anything, or have the slightest desire besides a remote fear to just do anything. You don't have to know anything about the forces at work doing things for or against you. You don't have to pry into a measure of pathology or insecurity. You just have to run up against “nuh uh” and react. There doesn't need to be a plan, a direction, good or bad reason, nothing. Just a whisper. Getting in shape doesn't have to do with eating healthy or caring about looks. A commercial could have rubbed you the wrong way at 7, and no one would be the wiser. Pursuing an academic career could be obsessive compulsive disorder “properly” channeled. There's plenty of evidence that seeking “the highest highs” of success in any one field is a measure of pure narcissism.

All you can do is take it and translate. You can pick, “narcissistic asshole?” or “greatest inventor ever!” Rapist or innocently-enough drunk? Hard-worker or desperate pipe-dreaming slave? Addicted or excuse ridden? Caring or pretending? Mistakenly hurtful or abusive? Joking or offensive? Somewhat right, or every ounce of wrong? Or a dozen things and a dozen more all at once all the time.

That's the point. I find myself at a perpetual emotional impasse because I've become persuaded of too many things at once. I still know when you're lying to me, but I know even better than you why you don't believe you're lying. I know what you're communicating to yourself, because I know what I'd have to tell myself to behave like you. I know what I'm telling myself to in fact behave like you. The difference is that I'm vocal about why I don't like it. I try to levy the guilt on myself, or you, or anyone who will listen when things don't seem to be working for bad, and a dozen more bad reasons all at once. I get frustrated when you decide not to hear the 10 positive and affirming and responsibility taking sentiments that accompany further questions you also ignore.

Because when you do that, you're not having honest conversations with yourself, and therefore me. You can never believe you're as big a problem as you are. You can never hear the excuses for how hollow they sound. You can never acknowledge a real hope or light that isn't harking back to that “nuh uh” survival mechanism blindly flailing. You're not you. You don't have a choice. You become another impersonal piece of data to process and figure out if or why I shouldn't bother. You communicate nothing because you are nothing. At least, nothing to me.

But I'm always something, aren't I? I wouldn't always be niggling away at you if I wasn't. If I didn't have a point or a voice, you wouldn't sneak away to read me when you're feeling a certain way or shut up at the opportune moment where you're about to feel or look stupid. My off-the-cuff and quickly forgotten sentiment haunts you months and years later. You've testified as much. I speak to a level of pain or struggle that, as you perpetually refuse to articulate, turns me into all kind of things I never intended to translate. But I give you the excuse. I give you the rope you need to hang me, yourself, and the rest of the congregation. Somewhere, alongside that “nuh uh” you know that my voice isn't mine, and the pain I describe and desperation and hopelessness is everything I'm taking in and relating to on the other side of the screen.

And I'm forced to relate to “you.” The bullshit you tell me about your bullshit job. The bullshit you post to facebook that you distract yourself with. The bullshit ways you use your finances to “keep on keeping on” and pay the bills. The “you” I never wanted to become in taking a “normal” job and finding myself fielding the same stupid questions from the same stupid coworkers about nothing in particular going nowhere. I'm forced to relate to the silence both my knowledge or my obscenity attempt to court. That is, until someone takes it upon themselves on a kind of pilgrimage once a year or so to get the balls to describe why they can no longer talk to me. They never were, but the clouds cleared in the form of an accusation or point of exhaustion and it's become safe to boldly proclaim the insistence they face and engage is abusive and negligent of their god-forsaken feelings.

I think I've done something right in this blog. It hurt to think at sections. I feel a palpable sense of hopelessness and resentment for each day “I didn't just do it.” I deserve the rest of my shit stolen or to actually come upon a picture of embers. I've lost the thread and now my life looks like compulsory comeuppance and “service” for those who are the starkest mirror to the faint voice provoking me. I'm growing addicted to the modern notions of “comfort.” I could see myself eyeing the fluid lies that protect me just enough to surface from my little homestead long enough to keep the lights on. I could disappear as quickly as they make the choice to erase themselves, as people do from my life, as the conversation dies just as it's getting good. I'll always have my hero stories, and my complicated screen relationships, and my “passions” that drive me into increasingly specific and overtly compelling descriptions about the end of the world.

I believe this is all I have left. My words. My words in relation to me attempting to process way too much input from every worst source. I don't have what I can do, I need to romanticize the past. I don't have where I'm going because dreaming no longer makes me happy. I barely have “right now” as eye strain and the prospect of paperwork looms larger than my capacity to hold the moment on the goose egg at the center of my brain. I feel like “why?” I don't even know what it means, but it's my perpetual feeling. Why to everything. I wanted sad to win when my shit was stolen, but there's more whys than any ability to think it's not just more on the pile. The why pile. I'm the monk who just does his thing and always says, “Is that so?” Or, I envy that monk.

Like I normalized abuses from my mom, and normalized the bullshit that was school, and normalized a “domineering rapey alcoholic obscenity,” and we normalized Bush and now Trump, and the families I engage with have normalized a guy following them taking notes, that's all I see winning. It's all normal, it all “works,” it's all one direction of justification. It's never the other side of the coin. The other side isn't dressed up lies denying the reality of the situation, as people insist, it's figuring out how to take all the shit and render it useful or informative. And if you're not doing it for yourself, it's not getting done. There's another indicator I know you're not doing work. You never really acknowledge the bad, how it operates, how it feels, where it feels, what it sounds like, or who's using it when. So when it pops up? Meh, not so bad, just an opinion, “You know, I've felt like that too sometimes!” You turn into it instead of relate to it.

When do I ever hear people trying to take responsibility for their fuck ups? A tad at work? But even then, quick to shuffle the responsibility back on my plate. “Yes, we do need to do better...butyoushouldhavesuchandsuch.” Bad sign. Dishonest at its core. And what is “do better?” Better leave that question alone or this talkin' to isn't going to sink in.

In 4 days I'll have 3 grand, maybe $1000 worth of projects to get done, and a weekend. Think I'll follow through? Or will life catch up? Will some emergency kick in where I need to schedule a client on the weekend? Will my car explode? Will I go back to the land and find even more of my shit is gone? Will I get sick? Will I discover lying about depression really does give me a sense of belonging I've never known before? What do you think? Will I flip the switch and after I get something marginally done after 2 and a half months of this job I'll start to feel like it's all worth it, and this blog will disappear into the bin of my old angst, easily enough ignored if not digested? Maybe I'll just sit, and die a little more each day. Maybe I'll decide money in the bank and my “comfortable enough” existence sleeping on a too small couch and rocking chair will suffice for another year. Maybe I'll let some ridiculous hippie sentiment about “now is a time for transition” to blare over any insistence to get off my ass. Maybe I'm never communicating anything ever, even to myself, and I'm only watching things unfold in a way that at least keeps the gun away from my temple.

I don't know, feel free to keep telling me nothing.

[736] Not Worth It

I was robbed. More specifically, my stuff was broken into. Turns out, there is not such a thing as “the middle of nowhere.” It's very much more that “nowhere is safe.”

Let's start with context. This is stuff I've left alone in my field for over a year. This is stuff I've not used for even longer. This is some stuff I've gotten for free. This is stuff that, as I was driving up to check on it, I imagined was burned to the ground before I arrived.

All the same...today I was asked, “You never have problems, do ya?” by a grandma whose house one of my clients holds her visits. This grandma offers me drinks I can't take. She asks about turning on lights I'm not concerned with. She's quick to want to move the clothes out of my way when I'm sitting on the porch keeping an eye on the kids for the report. For everything she's asked me or offered to do, I've responded with some version of, “It's not a problem.” I explained, in my job, you're always reminded “relative to what?” My problems are abstracted out or can be explained away indefinitely.

So what do I call getting broken into? What do I describe of my land, with its overgrown brush spurred on by incessant rain, and littered with ticks? How do I regard walking up to a scene of mostly destruction as boxes were torn through and the things I've accumulated were strewn about the property? Is this not a great and opportune problem if there ever was one? Doesn't it suggest a whole host of problems that had to accumulate resulting in the scene before me?

It's important to note, I have too many competing feelings to let any one win. There's relief. Relief that I've so prioritized the things I own that anything really worth stealing is in a closet here at the apartment. There's pride that I packed that truck so tight that it was difficult for them to even be disappointed. There's fear. Fear that, get this, I'm convinced that were I there, and had taken the advice of my neighbor to own a gun, there would be at least one dead person on my land. But if an emotion might win, I'd want it to be sadness.

Let's do my crime scene show play by play. I walk up and see a gas can next to my van. The cap is missing. It looks as though someone has tried to siphon its gas. I get around the back of the van, the door is left open on the moving truck. 2 bikes are laying down with vines growing over them. It's happened maybe a week ago. A bin and sink are laying there. Pieces of my drum set are sitting next to the front door. My dresser, sitting on my bar, is tipped over, the bar top removed, all crashed into the shit stored in the middle of the moving truck. I look into my coffee van, it's a mess, the only things obviously missing are the Wal-Mart pseudo college dorm shelf bins that housed my cups.

My heart drops further. I try to door to the shed/house. It's still locked. I look around the property for anything else obviously missing, thinking of my ladder. It's still up against the house where I left it. I step into the truck. You can see where they climbed on top of the stuff to rip apart boxes and toss the load of free books I collected. They may have made off with my register, which was empty. It seems they got maybe an old game system and box with assorted dvds or a few games. Whatever else, I didn't stick around to assess any further.

Why does sadness, why should sadness, win? It's one thing to steal something. You can tell their first thought was to break into the truck and drive away with everything in it. Discovering it's a broken piece of shit, they proceeded to trash everything. They threw the books. They left the coffee cups and filters to rot in the grass and rain. My drums are warped. The sink I hunted down so I could afford and meet code had filled with dirty water. Everything about me. Everything about my effort and intention and will just shit on. I don't believe they needed money. I don't believe it was mere mischief. Abject absence of any conception of humanity trash-panda-d my life.

I don't want these kind of reminders about how I think. I would bet that you can read one or a dozen blogs and think it's mostly blowing off steam or some measure of incoherent heartache. No. It's a reminder that I actually am the way I am. I actually think the things I say over and over again. I actually have a solid conception of “not having any problems” and I am prepared to lose things. I'm waiting to die, every moment. What's disheveled storage container pipe dreams in the face of that?

What a situation like this really attacks though is more fundamental and more dangerous. What's it going to take? That is, I've tapped my spine, spent years saving, living frugally, alienating and isolating, reading and writing, planning and budgeting, got a small piece of land, put my shit out there. AND I COULDN'T EVEN GET THAT FUCKING RIGHT! What the fuck does it take to even be left alone POOR, SO FUCKING POOR POOR IDIOTIC FUCKS DON'T EVEN STEAL THE RIGHT SHIT! What THE FUCK am I doing so wrong, or so right, that I CAN'T JUST BE LEFT A FUCKING ALONE TO EVEN FUCKING TRY, IN THE MIDDLE OF FUCKING NOWHERE, WITH MY SHIT THAT ISN'T EVEN FUCKING VALUABLE BUT FOR WHAT I WENT THROUGH TO GET IT!?

How much lower does the universe need my opinion of people? Don't I shuffle broken and ridiculous children to their broken ridiculous parents for a living? HOW THE FUCK AM I THE GUY WHO NEEDS A VISCERAL REMINDER THAT IT'S ALL FUCKING POINTLESS AND NOTHING MATTERS!? NO ONE GIVES A FUCK. THERE IS NO FORGIVENESS OR PERSPECTIVE THAT MATTERS. I've gone several years without killing anything with my car. I've killed a rabbit and skunk in the last 2 days. Not intentionally, but bringing them up feels fitting.

I witnessed a version of my funeral. When I'm dead and gone, that's what my shit will look like after the animals in the field go through it. How am I not already dead?

[735] LifeLickMyBalls

I just want to do a little bitching about my job so that maybe by the end I come up with a reason to not quit before my next paycheck.

 

My job wants me to have 21 or 22 face-to-face hours with clients. This includes driving, “goal-oriented” phone call time, and “casework.” I've been at the job for a month and half. The first month a series of shit shows that boiled down to having next to zero job shadowing, no instruction on the proper buzz words and paperwork, and a general “you'll figure it out, it's early” attitude.

Oh! the difference one week makes.

 

See, this morning was “these numbers are shit” a comment made by a supervisor who I don't believe realized I had signed into the video chat yet. I was told, “maybe you need to think about if this is the career for you.” I was offered to be put on part-time. I was asked, for the tenth time, “what is it we can do to help you?”

 

I'm not joking, last week, every week, there's been some sentiment of “yeah, starting out sucks, it's the worst part, you get all of the worst cases, have no idea, are overwhelmed, yada yada yada and it's okay. On a dime, I speculate because the boss's boss is a dick, I'm being told I might need to leave because the 30+ hours I had scheduled had people go on a cancelling spree at the last minute.

 

This is where things come to a head. This isn't “put in the hours” kind of work. This is “extract billable hours from the state” under the guise of “help.” You remember the list of things I gave that count as face-to-face? They LOVE if you're driving a client to and from Indianapolis for a 2 hour visit. They'll encourage you to hang out in the driveway “doing paperwork” an extra 15 minutes to tack on that much more. Casework? I'm not a therapist, I just play one under the guise of help. This means either watch YouTube videos related to the listed problems on their referral, pretend to make a 2 hour conversation out of 10 minutes worth of information, and build rapport with people who are at a phase in their life that may, on a good day, be described as pathologically lie-ridden.

 

The idea is to persistently make mountains out of mole-hills, ignore effective treatments and money savings by, you know, actually addressing the underlying systemic problems, and then berate an individual case manager for not making their hours, to the tune of their slightly above minimum wage, you know, the rate they went to college for.

 

On top of this, the horribly designed “leadership” structure means I'm catching it from 3-5 people in 3-5 different contradictory and shitty ways about information I've had to learn on the fly, pull out of them, or fuck up consistently enough that they finally figure out they can just answer simply and give me what they want and they'll get their way. We keep having check-ins and sit-downs, asking me, the completely new idiot who has no perspective or experience in this field just what it is I can do to get them to like me. I'm a number to you, asshole. Nothing. There's nothing I can do but go full sociopath and translate your ridiculous irrational anger onto clients until I scare them into compliance with threats over their children.

 

So that's what I'm doing.

 

I don't know if I'll have to atone for this period in my life, as I take no pleasure in it, but my arguments for a measure of pragmatism are wearing thin on my last remaining hairs of a conscience. This system, by design, turns “help” into a thinly-veiled bilk and threat that manifests as a number of hours. There's more than a little room to consider the people tasked with coaching and cheer leading and playing the game all at once might deserve a measure of fundamental respect, trust, and maybe paycheck that underscores their efforts. But no, it's incentivized. I need hours like a door to door salesman needs to unload knives. That's what I should be doing with my degree in psychology, sales and juggling HR complaints.

 

You'd think the people would be the worst part of the job! You'd think hearing grandma repeat herself 90 times about how low her granddaughter's bar is and how high her own is would be annoying. You'd think watching someone itch their pocked skin and lament they can't get the case worker who's looked the other way when they were high would make me feel bad. You'd think getting cussed out on the phone or getting shitty comments from some sickly piece of white trash might stick with me. NOPE. The hardest part is being pulled off to the side and being talked to like a feeble-minded huckster operating under the delusion that it's not time to put me out to pasture. It's knowing, full well, that the “better” I do this job, the more I refine my sociopathic tendencies. It's watching people, your middle-managers and supervisors, break in real time as they can see their families starving and on the street with one more ass-ramming from the indignant boys upstairs, so now it's your turn.

 

This is a great example though of me not really knowing what to do. Stick with it until the probation period is up? I'm already looking up other jobs. Most of my life has been living on between 4 and 6 thousand dollars a year. I made my 4 thousand or so so far. I've also made it almost 30 years without telling someone to go fuck themselves and walking off a job in a huff or breaking something. I'd like to keep that streak going, but with every ignored suggestion on how to make things better, with every explanation blanched, and every insinuation that I've been acting ignorantly or maliciously deliberately, I may show them what breaking can really look like. I want to do good, and I've put myself in the middle of the worst kind of people and job. I need money. Do I need more money that self-respect?

[734] Dirt

Let's see what I think tonight. 

 

I'm at the end of a series of comedy specials. Today, the idea of “comedy special” feels pretty cheap. I wasn't in tears for 4 hours as each person relayed dark hysterical truths. I modestly enjoyed a handful of guys who told a few stories, told a few jokes, and occasionally phrased something in a way that got me to laugh. At the end of these shows, I watched a special on Richard Pryor. Pryor didn't just define the genre, he inspired and invigorated anyone who saw him. He did it alongside a host of marriages, addiction fallout, and the infamous fire stride, but he did it nonetheless.

 

It’s interesting to listen to people talk about someone who's gotten as big as you can get. The ones close enough that it's not a judgment no matter how dramatic things get. No matter how famous or rich or funny, people are people all the way through. They can go crazy. They can lose the thread and change into everything amazing or terrible with each passing day. The special ends with Pryor saying you didn't pick to come here and you sure as hell don't choose how you go out, so you better be having fun. He wishes when people see a picture of him they'll laugh, and that they'll remember him as part of a story.

 

I know that I'm always looking. I want the next laugh. I want to be surprised that I might start contemplating a tattoo of some character or source of inspiration. I want a way to translate my voice and intention into something that isn't whatever can be made into blogs. In my search, or, in relaying my search efforts, I get a lot of very specific feedback. It's never the kind I'm asking for, nor when I seek out specific input is anyone I've asked willing to provide it. This is in contrast to getting a laugh. Those are usually pretty easy for me. I can crack a joke or react in a moment in a way I cannot garner focus or attention towards things I take “seriously.”

 

That's kind of the joke. That's the universal irony. I deeply appreciate the capacity to sit back, take it all in, and find reasons to indulge, but that's only half the picture. I need a measure of specificity, intention, and honesty behind work. For some reason, when I decide to get stressed out or write something damming about how the world “works” I'm met with a ton of flippant condescension. My mood is diagnosed. The reasons I'm doing something are spelled out. Mind you, I wouldn’t find this so annoying if it was ever remotely correct. I'm not merely attention seeking, I'm not merely putting on a show. I don't have some secret underlying stress or guilt. I have very real topical practical things that should be able to be done or accomplished that I've run out of ways of figuring out how to do alone.

 

Consider, who gets off diagnosing your dreams? Can you think of a more ignorantly presumptuous thing? How do you even barely wrap your head around the crazy shit that can happen in them, then to relay almost barely half of it, and here people chime in with things about past lives or your fears. Get over yourself. I wrote about a dream where I watched the sun fall and break apart. Oncoming explosions made their way towards where I was standing. The only part of that dream that matters to me is that until I was absolutely sure those explosions were about to hit me did I bother to start running. I wasn't convinced, I doubted the distance, I considered that the sun can fall and break apart, but what the hell would that have to do with explosions heading towards me? It was probably a trick. Also, if this was the end, this is as good a time as any to rest easy and die quick.

 

I don't like what people are convinced of. I don't want to be a part of groups who are less “with it” than I am. Imagine being a comedian hanging with Pryor or Robin Williams and then finding yourself on a circuit for a year with a dozen PC-police types. Are they booking shows and technically comedians? Maybe. But they aren't your scene and you're not really getting what you need.

 

Here's a real world example. I started going out to the hippie gardener and intentional-living community meetings in town. 15-20 “alternative lifestyle” types gather in an overgrown garden to discuss their plans. It felt like the worst meeting of middle-school minds I could imagine. “What projects are we all working on?” This turned into a list of 25 titles of different organizations around town. All with disparate purposes and, apparently, a single person who knew anything about what they did. The one remotely tangible thing that was discussed to get done, building a barn, was brushed away, or, “openly embraced” as methodically as whatever else was mentioned. The next day when I asked one of the attendees what the take-away was, he said “to enhance the cooperation between the various groups we all belong to. Create greater complexity of network.”

 

Noticeably absent from his reply was any tangible steps for what that would look like. No phone calls, or regular meet-ups, or even a message board. We got together to say we should get together more.

 

Everywhere I witness the same things. A lack of leadership, basic facts or beliefs missing about the structures of how things run, and people on the verge of exploding covering up their pain and insecurities with the most ridiculous avoidance and placating language. People certainly aren't having fun. They're whining, they're clawing, they're broke, and they're hairy, but they're so afraid of being actually responsible for anything it's defer to safe personal spaces of do-gooder-adjacent-ish activities and pat each other on the back for being weird and not judging someone's proclivity for believing in the healing power of crystals (or some such other nonsense.)

 

You know why people can't get along? They don't want to. I don't want to like these people. I don't want to get used to their body odor. I don't want hear them talk about their communist affiliations or speak about their difficulties finding housing because they can't bring themselves to get a job that can afford said housing. I don't want to pick ticks out of my ass while 4 wanna-be nature boys pretend to know the name of a fucking tree in the yard.

 

One of the comedians I watched was Jerry Seinfeld. I'd never watched a special of his before. He didn't have the crazy upbringing. He's not an addict. He just wrote jokes, and more jokes, and more jokes, and went to where the people who where writing and telling jokes were 7 nights a week. Sitting on a ledge on his lunch break from breaking up concrete, he decided he wanted to be a comedian and has been riding the high of that culture ever since. That's something that makes sense to me. That's also something I've never really had.

 

I live in a time where everything is old and over-saturated, besides the actual truth. People don't want the truth on a good day, we're living under the spell of tyrannical populism and a strong-man mythos. So where do I fit? “Hey, not to be too much of a bother, but you people not only almost all showed up 45 minutes late, but you didn't even have a white board prepared.” That's a bad sign, because shit smells all the way through. When I say someone should lead the charge, I don't want to hear, “I disagree we need a traditional leadership structure.” Dude! You don't have a structure! It doesn't take a rocket scientist to diagnose how you get 20 people getting nothing done over a year but a single modest garden and dinner once a week.

 

I know I need to do it alone, and it's the most frustrating part. I know I'll need all the money I'm ever going to need. I need to dig every hole, plant every seed, and sweat every drop, by myself, occasionally my dad will pop in when he gets laid off. I can't join a group of children pretending to have a clue. I won't spin my wheels being part of such-and-such organization. I'm tired of sitting around if it doesn't at least contain progress on my shows and movies. People do not operate like me. They don't think about tomorrow when they've got “big plans” to add zucchini to the garden next year.

 

All of this is to say, I'm still alone. I've peaked into another stupid world, I'll probably waste a bit more of my time there, and then I'll retreat a few weeks later after a few more saved up paychecks, and make another down payment on my individual future and goals. I don't need to lose my mind to be funny, I wish I had something so enticing as to focus on it day in and day out, with people I admire and relate to, and in the meantime, I'll shuffle my “real world” job to the furthest depths of my attention, just above getting fired, watch my shows, do my reading, and dream. No one is coming. No one is even going to speak intelligently towards you regarding anything you even remotely care about. Stop pretending. And fuck them if they think you're too angry. They're too stupid and lazy to have a fucking clue in the first place.

[733] Truth Rapists

I feel like if I don't write about this now while I don't feel anything, the thoughts are only going to become corrupted by anger that cause them to drift further away from what needs to be explored.

I really don't know how to begin. I say this often, but this time it's really important because the different parts that need to weave together actually speak to one larger point and isn't a million random roads trying to make sense of it all. Keep this in mind if any one damming sentiment starts off a paragraph, as that was just a door or window into the house I'm trying to construct.

I was finally de-friended by my ex. In her words, “I can't justify you as a friend.” She explained that she couldn't figure out how to defend herself, or me, when I came up in conversation. Instead of attempting to anymore, better out of sight and out of mind.

What was she being asked to defend? Well, to start our conversation she straight up asks the million dollar question, “Did you rape Girl?” I go, “What the fuck? Fuck no?” You see, for several months, not only has the “overly masculine” tenor of our friend group in common come under question, spurred on by #metoo, but the sole player who set everyone up to fail in general was zeroed down to me. That failure consists of either setting the party conditions, condoning shitty behavior, or otherwise being completely unable to change or recognize when what I'm doing has made someone uncomfortable.

I feel for the sake of trying to keep coherent, and relative brevity, we need to pass right over a discussion of endless interpretations, the fallibility of memory, fickle nature of feelings, and otherwise previously noted angry agendas one might bring to that conversation.

But to quickly put a bow on my understanding of the night and girl in question. I sat down on a couch next to her after a bit of dancing. She rubs on my leg. I rub on her arm. Wink wink, nudge nudge, I literally ask her if she wants to go fool around. She says yes, follows me upstairs, through the living room, outside to the side of the house, quick little make out, quick enough sex to not encounter anyone on a smoke break, and we head back inside. I, in an open relationship, sit down next to my ex and say, “Dammit, I just had sex with Girl.” She laughs and goes, “Really? Why?” The only answer that makes sense is drunk and generally horny.

I don't know about you, but people who rape don't seem to ask the girl if she wants to have sex, do it semi-publically, and then sit down next to their girlfriend and talk about how dumb it was to fool around with someone they weren't attracted to. It was perhaps rude, or crass, or slutty, but the way you call it rape is from a collection of forces I hope to describe going forward.

I've been on the outs with, at least the females, of that college group for some time. You know, or maybe you don't, when no matter what you say when or how it will always be wrong? I'm not saying you even did something wrong, but you've found a person that were you to bring them flowers, they'll tell the world you tried to cause them an allergic reaction meant to kill them? Well, I was getting a lot of that. Often, this is related to me as a difference between “thinkers” and “feelers,” so named. While I want to analyze and break down words, they just want to call me a name, make sure I believe it, and we both walk away healthier or better for it? In that I understand they felt really bad and it manifested as a measure of how terrible I am, therefore now we're better?

Honestly, in the years I've been writing, not a single person has ever bothered to explain why this is better, mature, healthy, or something I should just accept.

So, with one of the girls it was jumping down my throat about relaying my desperate feelings under an article she posted about dying polar bears. You see, I'm not allowed to feel, or tell you about it. That spiraled into a whole thing I've already written about. Then, another girl comes to town and I text if her and her boy want to hang out. A follow up text resulted in a clap back, in modern parlance, essentially shuffling me back in my corner for daring to ask or want to hang in the first place. Probably the first pin in these cascading examples of “fuck that guy” was a wholly terrible conversation where I, probably stupidly, decided to try and gain insight from another girl about my ex, another, highly liked, saga that I thought required a breakdown.

Mind you, none of the guys who are with these girls have given me shit nor changed their attitude, nor said they were right on board with setting me adrift on the ice sheet for my misdeeds or words. Either all of these girls are with complicit lying cowards, or they've all accepted something vital to a lasting relationship that I ignore to the degree in which I seek to alienate myself. It's not an either/or, but it also is.

So I've got angry girls, who I've made so before #metoo, who are every ounce of the chatty gossip dick heads that everyone I hung out with was or is, cooking for months. Now Girl, fairly good friends with one of them, shares her story. Damage I've managed to do in the last 2 or 3 years, combined with the reimagining of the past with fervent moment energy, more than enough for more contributions to the cascading damnation of my character, a galling man, no less.

Can you take all that in as one or two pieces, or one or two windows? The next part is more personal and about my relationship with my ex.

I've said many times I knew we were doomed to fail. I wasn't looking forward to it, but I knew, like I generally always know, people. I don't mean generally. I mean individuals. I know what's running their machinery. I know it despite my convoluted ways of attempting to describe. I know it in ways that I try to contradict in efforts to be “normal,” in some Hollywood or cliché fashion. The only reason I know it is because I was forced to look and pay attention in order to avoid causing myself harm. So, I know that she never “loved” me, in the broadest sense of the term. I know, in the least condescending way the idea can be conveyed, that I started the relationship a jaded old whore, and she was an enthusiastic child.

What do children do? They play with things. They test things. They're generally open to new experiences. That's great! For a jaded old whore, yet also overgrown child, like myself. I can make it fun and lead her into worlds and behaviors she wouldn't necessarily pick by herself. This is key. I'm a novelty. I'm not “[redacted]” at this point. I'm a point of intrigue and a tool for her self-actualization. It's worth noting, I don't even have to claim this as conjecture, she literally described her process this way yesterday evening.

I also frame it like this because I hesitate to simply regard her as “maliciously selfish.” I believe the naivety overrules malcontent. I don't think she played me, but I do think she was playing with me. I, like a romantic fool, took my feelings and time investment and willingness to be open to more than my high-school forlorn teenager perspective, and ran with it. I had the hottest girl. She had qualities I thought complimented or I might learn to adopt a measure of. She had interests independent of mine. She seemed to surround herself with a measure of also caring, informed, or otherwise worthwhile individuals. Can't really ask for more, on paper. So, how do you justify having a tool in your arsenal that's outdated?

Here I think it's worth noting that for all of my worries concerning my potential malevolence in manipulating people or treating them as objects, or hell, even direct condemnations of my character alleging as such devoid of all evidence, my crowning testament on my built up concept of “friends” was to do the exact opposite of this kind of behavior. It was live and let live. It was meet people where they are. It was accept their quirks or habits or issues as them, and just be a good goddamn friend. For that matter, it's still what I believe in, even if I persistently stab or have forgone more monolithic conceptions of “friend.” Even if my slutty behavior registers as a measure of shame or regret in someone else, I don't think sex is unfriendly, unless you're a rapist.

We've got child-like love interest, women of a certain age pairing off and resentful, the cultural zeitgeist of every man is a rapist devil, my general, at least questionable, behavior and attitude compounding over years, and then I serve up hundreds of blogs discussing fucked up topics or ideas and picking apart what it means to manipulate or relate, throw in a few niggas here and there, and the soup never stops blending. How could anyone justify that? As an idea, even before a tool. What kind of horrible monster did these poor girls find themselves entangled with?

The only thing I wish to testify to my character, because god knows my words are horrible, is the opinion of the friends who don't behave like that. It’s the relationships I've had since high-school or elementary school, who don't entertain for months or years the idea that I'm a rapist before they choose to call or ask me about it. What are friends for? Gossip, intolerance, and vitriol? No no. They're supposed to let you know what's fucked up. They're supposed to see and relate things to you, that while maybe obvious to them, you've pathologized. Should I trust the message after it's gone through the process described above? Do I need to look inward at my horrible soul in a way I never have before now that finally, all of these people who've, on significantly less serious issues, shown themselves as hostile witnesses or implacably biased juries?

Maybe now we've got 5 or 6 windows: Zeitgeist shit storm, I'm an impossibly (so much I don't even exist!) easy target, complicated mess of feeling-based judgment thrown in gossip-cycle, general children and child-like proclivities abound, and my “hopeful” (willful?) blindness about what I perceived to be things as “as good as you can get” with regard to friendships beyond the realm of my “quasi-sociopathic” ones.

Still with me? Then a quick reiteration and aside.

One of the things that concerns me considerably more than choosing to do something stupid is the idea that I would be wildly surprised by how much damage I'm causing carrying on in the way I do. The Girl who claims rape? That fucking sucks to think that all the atmosphere and ideas and work I've put towards trying to stop having sex vilified or be used as this all-encompassing testament to misused power or misunderstood connection would be regarded as “he possibly raped someone” by the people most involved in creating that fucking atmosphere! And no, I didn't say it sucks that she would feel that way. It does. But that's, honestly, not something I can understand without throwing everything about me and how I understand the world off a cliff. Today we talk about things like “affirmative consent.” We say things like, “she can't give consent if she's drunk.” By the overtly-”safe” and, if not at least often impractical, metrics of today, I apparently couldn't give consent either, as I'd been drinking too, or should have taken her word “yes” and accompanying head nod and follow as a warning of impropriety?

And what kind of person who isn't wholly behind a cliche hippie-adjacent sex ideology (I've never heard of them taking to rape either) takes to the page, twice now, to delineate his potentially shit behavior? Methinks he doth protest too much? Fuck you! You can't protest ridiculous irrational debasement of people enough. Would I be the first to introduce you to the cultural psychosis that is Trump?

Let's try to bring it home.

All of this is to attempt to speak to the house in which your mind rests. Is your opinion the rumor mill, or the investigation? Is your concept of “friend” the direct confrontation and open acceptance and engagement, or the punching bag? Is your first impulse to deny there's a person there at all, or to give them such the benefit of the doubt that you'd earnestly hope and spend 5 years with them, and then not even be angry or blame them after the dust settles and you figure out how talk about it? I figured out how to talk about it, she figured out how to get rid of her old tool. I'm willing to get into the weeds of drunk sex behavior, because I'm not ambiguous about where I feel I sit in relation to the people I've had or wanted to have sex with. Has the thought “Yeah, I'm gonna fuck this bitch and she's gonna like it and can't stop me” ever crossed my mind? Not until now in order to write it or without more irony than there's words for. Is that a melodramatic depiction meant to disguise my otherwise sly and corrupt soul that could justify anything? Of course, if you want it to be. I don't have 740 blogs of insight into my being and hundreds of relationships or sexual encounters over years that should give me the benefit of the doubt. Girl felt bad that for 2 dissatisfying minutes, I turned her as slutty as I am. Just like the girls felt bad that I chose to question when they put words in my mouth, or described feelings I didn’t have, behind something I said they disliked.

Who, right now, is leaning towards a sentiment that I'm trying to bash or unfairly stereotype women? Can the ones who feel that way even see the previous sentence? Because what I did was stop and think about my phrasing. I took my opposition's side and imagined what they feel like as someone's ex, or who empathizes hard-core with any girl who's felt violated. And I know that, while I, explicitly, am making a larger point about the lens from which to view the world and the people in it, I have juxtaposed a “relationship story” against a less than deferential tone about #metoo, employed trigger words like “gossip” and “naive” with regard to women, and denied myself the opportunity to demonize sex or masculinity as inherently evil and precarious. Clearly, I just don't understand the depth of the feelings that should render my perspective mute. I'm basically Trump.

Now, go on, opposite-world engine, do your thing. I'll hide behind my enablers and words until it's time to execute. Because, again, I already know what you want, and how you go about getting it.

[732] I Hurt Myself Today

There's a character named Nick in the series “I'm Dying Up Here.” Nick is a junkie. Nick's been molested. Nick fucked the girlfriend of one of his friends. That last one though, the girlfriend fucked him back so don't yell at me #feminism. Nick was one of the first ones to make it to Carson, though he didn't get the couch. Nick's got some of the edgiest or brutal off-the-cuff commentary about the crowd or the various ways in which his life is going to shit at that moment. Nick couldn't stop himself in front of the police, nor a judge. Nick is under the spell of his demons.

Earlier today I watched “Bill Nye Saves the World” as well. One episode was about addiction. Addiction isn't just being genetically disposed to finding yourself robbed of the decision to engage in a specific substance. There's behavioral addiction. That's compulsive gamblers or binge eaters. Addiction is when you keep doing something not because it feels good, but to keep from feeling bad.

I've been consistent in saying I'm not addicted to things. The largest “compulsion” I've had towards any activity brings me back to youth and video games or the collecting and listing of things. I've speculated those habits arose from being treated like a juvenile delinquent in spite of my knowledge or effort and the resulting stress. That abusive frame of reference gave me my edge. I've justified or explained a torrent of my behavior in the context of being fucked with for too long too early. If I adopted #mommyissues to launch every blog for the last 14 years, it'd be safe to say we could all see the nature of my addiction.

What if the language of addiction can still be instructive? What if the form it can take is more subtle? I've never gone more than maybe a week without sugar, likely since I was a baby. What schedule of horribly grumpy moods and headaches might that withdrawal look like? I can, somehow, always talk myself out of the patience and calm of taking everything in stride and giving myself a little time to eat something or wake up before I damn my lamentable fate. What irrational animal got addicted to that kind of shitty behavior? I've made it to the gym 2 days in a row. What line of “reasoning” persuades a person who sleeps maybe 4 hours a night he doesn't have the time to go and figure out his shower routine? It must be close to the language that sends me to White Castle straight from the gym, you know, because change doesn't happen overnight or I need to control the terms of my pursuit of marginally better health.

I know I'm under a surfeit of spells. I was recently told a story about someone marveling over the wonders of my town. Did you know? You can walk the streets here without getting stabbed! This relayed by a plastered civil engineer who blames himself for the calamity of traffic during road construction. Little does he know my friends and I all carried knives walking around our home town too. It took me a year or so before I didn't feel like leaving mine at home was akin to leaving my wallet. 

What stops me from doing the right thing? What stops me from doing the right thing all of the time? Besides the immediate confusion about what may constitute “the right thing,” why do I ever, for even one second, give myself the room to not go to the gym, not prepare the meal (or look up the handful of easy and affordable recipes for variety), or not just do simple shit like buy binders and transparencies and build a literal highlighted back up of what I read and plan on doing in the future? Why do I waste moments on distractions? Or, why don't I have the right kind of disgust or aversion to that behavior built into my mind more rigidly?

These next few bits are either the excuses or the context. That degree of focus takes a huge amount of energy and has proven to alienate me. Ph.D focus in a C and D world puts you at odds with everyone all the time if you bother talking. Just like nobody is going to listen to you intensely rattle on about proper chemical names and neurophysiology, nobody gives a shit that your cause or concerns on the ground motivate you to do whatever the things it is that you're doing. Outside of academia, it doesn't hurt to behave “normally” and try to have friends.

Pursuing, ceaselessly, a measure of “perfection” regarding your behavior or being seems to lead to self-destruction. It's not “you” anymore doing things, it's the number you have to hit, the attention you can garner, or the soap box from which to preach. How much of my writing is me bitching about how people aren't as concerned about the same things I said I was? How unsympathetic I was if you couldn't find the time to read 5 articles totaling 50 pages a day. I understood colloquially, but I didn't get it. “Real-world” regular jobs are soul-sucking. The call of death is real. Investing in friends and family in real ways are as entirely capable of becoming addicted to too.

The last bit of context is the one place I think nobody who's under that pursuit of “good” “all the time” and “no excuses” ever wants to realize. Once you get what you want, it might feel good for a second, you don't want to pursue it or do it all the time any more, and the achieved goal has transformed into a perfect excuse. That seems about the best way to describe my mental position.

Why pursue connection or affection; I've already been the biggest whore AND dated a version of my ideal. Why practice, even poorly, one or dozen instruments every day; I've already made my fingers do what I wasn't able to even imagine AND gotten bored as shit listening to variations on those advanced themes. Why join a sports league or make new friends at work; I've already routinely managed to scare, piss off, or offend away around 2 friends a year AND can get a dozen phone numbers and several dozen more laughs any night of the week. Why get in shape; the car crash is coming just around the corner, I just know it. I stopped playing video games because I beat and perfected the ever-loving shit out of so many growing up. I think I might have generally stopped looking forward to things.

I framed my expectations in ways that were either easily thrown in my face or designed to meet a substandard absolution of those around me. What else is there to gain in that kind of environment? People are at the mercy of our objectively terrible times, don't keep in touch, don't come through on even their most piddling words, look at you exasperated, angry, and/or dejected about every “negative” thing you say which wholly override all you're attempting to do. So blame them in blogs they don't read and live to gripe another day. Forgive them their priorities and pathologies. What example is left to set that isn't an ego-driven mad lunge for faux-immortality? What example is left to be set?

There's plenty of hard bodies already out there to cream over. My concept of “being nice” isn't the gleaming lying assess of the masses people seem to prefer. To be sure, I still have 15 things I want to do on the land practically overnight, but now I have a better handle on the time and cash behind them. I can't run like I did with the coffee shop. I don't mean to suggest I didn't trip or didn't wish for places to pause and show caution. I mean blissfully ignorantly into the future predicated on a foundational belief in my capacity. I got tempered. Temperance feels like death.

Leave it to me to recklessly abandon my physically self-destructive job for a mentally degrading one where the people wear their addictions and excuses on their sleeves! Trapped and spiraling away from further obligations in order to stave off feeling truly bad. I can only imagine the withdrawal of missing out on my children. I can just peek back into one or ten blogs spiraling out about the loss of “friends” though, and bet you turn that shit up to 11 before nailing through your hand to affix the dial.

What I had in the past wasn't about me. I was feeling my dad's support, Wendy's, Hatsam's, the friends who helped unpack and decorate, the people who volunteered to hand out booze or Schroeder not expecting to get paid to DJ. My grandma used to insist I could be whatever I wanted to be and doing well in school wasn't just money, but accolades and protection. Hell, there's my addiction to over-achieving, I still think if I'm not bringing home at least As and Bs I'm unloved or going to get the shit beat out of me. Then, so wisely, I tied my habits and capacity to a “responsibility for the whole world” and remain stubbornly indignant I can't find anyone to help me save it. I'll tip my hat to Bill Nye and the scientists he features at the end of each episode. I'll return to my hole cheerleading the 1 in 5 “families” with a chance to go back to using and abusing without supervision.

And could I blame them? Doesn't addiction truly have a claim to fame in transcending boundaries? Well, I guess not racial boundaries, but for those not right up against being bred for hopelessness? Is the world still not in shock over Anthony Bourdain? Aren't there a million articles speculating about his motivations, his exhaustion, or his behavior? Aren't we all so ready to ball up our “favorite” celebrities as something we can understand in lieu of accepting our own moments of wanting to die? When the connection doesn't feel there. When the attempts go ignored or are unwelcome. When we're so caught up in one isolated epiphany that feels so true and clear it may as well be as compelling an awakening as any revelatory drug.

You die alone.

In your grief, in your fear, in your confusion, with your wild eyes staring back in every reflection, with every memory and regret and in spite of your last doubt, you die alone.

Maybe that's as real and alive as he's felt in years.

[731] Destination

I'm adrift.

Depending on which movie you watch, being adrift means you will eventually get saved, have wild hallucinations before you do so, or will freeze, drown, or be eaten well before anyone thinks to look for you. My fate is not written. I'm no less adrift.

I recently heard the line, “Man makes plans and God laughs.” I've heard it before. It's loud again because I've, mostly, forsaken the idea of plans. I pretend to make plans and it makes me dispositionally unavailable. What does that mean? When I so often am denied the consequences of my plans, I put away and hide the part of me that expects things. It's a measure of self preservation, but you must consider, if you don't expect things, you're at the mercy of them.

But let's not get too abstractly stupid and philosophical. Why, out of nowhere, did I think right now I needed to write? I want. I want so many things. I want them before I die. I want them for other people. I want them to inform wants I probably can't conceive of yet.

Think about that. I think of a party. I don't know what I'm going to say. I persistently make people laugh. Friends, strangers, and people upset with me. I never know what the comment will be. I'm not in the mirror rehearsing. I'm not filling notepads with jokes. Who I am, and how I speak, I've built into an end goal of getting a laugh. Can I say the same about larger goals? Is how I am suitable for something to take off one day and be of consequence? If I get my Jordan Peterson-light version of virulence, will I handle it with the appropriate degrees of tact and deference?

But that's so far and stupid to speculate, and of course the answer is no. Again, dude, what is making you write right now? What do you want that 1 person, years from now, by accident, to click with and realize in spite of all the other words to nowhere, they managed to find something?

I miss having things that are sad to say goodbye to. I talk so often of the sweet release of death. Tonight was a nostalgia night where I clicked through old band footage and random videos I took with my camera back in high school. Back when my ideas of me more matched my actual physical embodiment. Back when the arrogance was underwritten by hope and expectations. The catch? It's still right now. I still don't hate anyone who showed up in a party video. I still am exhausted from spending so much time sucking in a parking lot during marching band. I still laugh at the phrasing and jokes and smiles. There is a timeless quality. You never really have to say goodbye or let go.

In school you're thrown together by accident. None of you choose the different moves your parents made. And yet, every day you can find yourself creating something worth laughing about or remembering. You can find yourself organizing around a shared principle that renders your differences mute. You share. You experience. You struggle and joke and create. And even if it sucks, all of that time in between the performance is built into who you are. I was clearly fascinated by this and that's why I chose to film it.

Something so stupid does it. “Let's go to state!” With no chance of getting to state we spend weeks marching to death and rehearsing music only half the band cares to learn. “Let's all get drunk!” The fights and interpersonal bullshit of the week before doesn't matter because so and so decided it's topless time. The “adults” then organize around their jobs or their sports leagues or their trivia groups. It's lost on me why I can find people collectively pursuing inevitably failing ends across domains, and anyone doing something world-altering and worth a damn is tucked safely away in academia far away from the public. Catch that Vice special? No? No matter, you won't be able to afford a 3-D printed ear anyway.

But why are you writing!? What is it you want people to know? How are you the smallest gust of a half-hearted cough that “wakes up” someone picking your words instead of Google's?

I still feel real. I still believe in choice and consequence. I still think life is simpler than people give it credit for, and I still feel responsible. Without fail I can announce some plan I have for myself in the future, and the prevailing idiot of my moment will say, “No you won't.” I'm not him. I'm not a punk or a liar. I'm not at the mercy of depression or anxiety. I write away every sad sack capitulating bitch fest about how much I hate everything. I do this frequently. It's the process. It's the work. I rob myself of excuses and I take what I want from a world who always hides little explosives in my handfuls.

I want to stop asking things of people. I want to be so hard they just are too. I can never get where I need to be with words. Words are the sorting out of what I don't want. Words are the road my subconscious brain goes towards self-destruction. So I can pick the words. I can plant them here instead of there. I need more doing. I need more ownership. The solution is never to wait for someone to ask or until you feel comfortable. The solution is to pile it on. The solution is to try and exhaust yourself by going as overboard as you did in the past, but pull back before you literally pass out. And it doesn't take a commitment in a blog like your “structured indulgences.” It takes every day telling yourself, “Fuck you, you ignorant piece of shit who doesn't know anything. Get the fuck up. Change, you bitch. What are you? A bitch ass nigga like everyone who reads you and shits the bed?”

The answer is no. I'm not a bitch ass nigga. I'm not unduly harsh or skeptical. I'm me I get what I want. I change. I learn. I adapt. I do and try and own. While my arms work I need to paddle for shore. While my voice rings I need to yell at the sky. While my feet kick, I need to curb stop the bullshit that set me adrift in the first place. I make moments feel like years. Maybe I'm not as bad as it feels. But fuck that, of course I am. I'm worse. Because I even allowed myself that bullshit maybe.

I haven't wanted the responsibility. The call of age and relaxation and death is real. I act like I can't see the benefits. I act like it wouldn't be nice to not feel guilty about whoring up again. I act like I won't start seeing more ways to attempt to capitalize. I act like I don't want to see the scale counter go down. I act like I have a solid plan for my body falling apart in small ways all at once. I act like I can be evaluated on any scale that isn't my own. I act. I'm fascinated with the act and actors. I didn't know I was so method. I didn't know I embodied the role and it would take so many years for the academy to recognize my contribution to the medium.

I need to do better. Worse than that. I need to do the best. I need to watch all my TV. I need to read everything I want to read. I need to straddle all the depressing and ridiculous shit that comes with it. I need to look forward to goodbye when the things I care about end. I need to pursue the people who are at least as big of abject failures as me, but are going to give my life meaning in a way I'm forever unable to do on my own. I need to do it every day. I need to wake up not hating each day and waiting out my life. I want the new old parties. I want the new failed friendships and acquaintances. I want the person who's every bit as motivated and arrogant as he was in the videos he watched tonight, but with a dash of wisdom for how that shit goes wrong. I want it shared and celebrated. I want to make you be what I ask of you.

I won't get it otherwise. You're not me. You're not willing to listen or try or risk the things I am. So I need to take your life. I need to plug it in like I plugged it in to parties. I need to be an enabler. And I need to know it's mine and mine alone that will see it through. Failure isn't an option. I’m fucked. Do it anyway.

[730] Morning Would

I don't usually write in the morning. My head never feels like it gets things together until minimum 5 or 6 pm. Whether I have a morning routine and wake up consistently before my alarm clock or not, it's just not my time. Starting this now, 9:52 am before I have work things to get done around noon, is because I want to write through this persistent feeling I wish I never had. It's that “tired” and “stiff” and “indignant” sense that reacts to texts and small asks of my attention as a mild shock of negativity with each sound from my phone. It's the feeling I carried into practically every school day. It's the space of indifferent indecisiveness which seems to dictate a significant portion of my existence.

 

The last few days I've been reading over my “Understanding Yourself” personality test from Jordan Peterson. I was a psychology major. I've written nearly 730 blogs about myself and my experiences over the last 14 years. This test didn't give me a whopping dose of insight, but it did give me numbers. I then watched a few people discuss their results and see how their results matched with their ideas of themselves or how their friends perceived them. Most of my numbers didn't lie in extremes besides the things you'll know about me within about 2 minutes of meeting me. What I mostly liked was that the things I scored moderately on are things I've worked on making less extreme.

 

The people who take this test, I must assume, are cut from the same kinds of cloth. Who doesn't want to know more about themselves? I remember watching a psychologist tell The Iceman killer how he scored on The Big Five traits and the guy teared up. Nobody had offered that kind of demonstrable and calculable insight into his behavior before. He was no longer “just a killer” or monster. The more aware you are of the reasons for your behavior, the more you can conceive of a choice in how you respond to it. When the test says I'm excessively impolite, I can go out of my way to listen more, choose nicer language, and forgo arguments I'm persistently willing and capable of having.

 

But back to the morning haze. What can I be aware of in this moment that doesn't make me go to the gym for an hour, shower up early, prepare breakfast, and go into my day like I give half a shit about my drive to Columbus with a dude I've never met? Why do I know, even if I push it to the last minute, the task is probably going to get done, even if as I write this sentence I'm skeptical and resentful of my own being being true to its word? What is that? That didn't come up in the test results, so to speak, except to say my, now, moderate levels of industriousness means I'll slog through tasks. But there's a deeper demon there. There's the one that wants to sleep, or die, or struggle with the choice of bothering to invest in less than he desires.

 

Because what do I desire? I want a measure of things I can take for granted. If you're “hyper aware” of things, you get tired. Always I know the ten things I'm not doing that I either “should” or want to. I find the energy immediately when the opportunities present themselves. I got sent a text by accident saying there was something an old neighbor of mine wanted to show me. I go from half asleep lounging on the couch to dressed and excited in 30 seconds, just quick enough for him to text me saying he realized his mistake. It's always there. If some Ed McMahon-esc workout guru kicked in my door and said we're rushing outside to do the Use It Or Lose It Challenge and upon doing so I get free healthy meals delivered to my door for life, well, I'll be puking in the street an hour from now having betrayed my body who's never been able to handle that level of exertion in the morning.

 

I have an avoidance mechanism for pain, but I sit in a kind of existential one at all times. That may just be being an adult, that may just be I'm too smart and dumb to know better. I don't want to have people pissed off at me for dropping the ball at a job I hate, any more than I wanted to flunk out of school. I'm not really thinking I can't handle a hundred more poor opinions of me and where I'm coming from in “friends” opining. I'm pretty openly hostile that you have much of anything to say about me or the left field wilderness from where I might make my next choices. Is simply having that feeling more important than it being true? Is the mundane structure and slow self-immolation the contrasting power from which I draw all of mine? Because, devoid of ego, you don't really exist after all, right? Relationships do. I'm at the intersection of my particles and the places they concurrently exist. My overweight begrudging slog capable of indefinitely delayed gratification and affordable placation outweighs my “ideal” day and things I wish I had organized well enough to rarely if ever think about. I'm an apt analogy for what I might think to criticize about reality.

 

It starts with a feeling though. I feel “bleh.” I feel the tension behind my eyes already. I stretch what I take to be the budding arthritis in my hand. I have about an hour and a half before I need to get up or else. Why don't I “do more?” Why don't I take the time to cook healthier meals instead of start to hate the idea of chicken and salad after 6 days in a row as an entire 2nd package starts to spoil and dry out that was supposed to be for another week? Why don't I just take the 5 minutes to print the things I need to print and update my calendar? I could have done it between this and the last paragraph as I read up on what to call what I'm assuming to be pre-arthritis. 

 

Intellectually, I know I can always feel worse than I do, but I never get there. I'm not sad enough to do the kind of drugs that would compromise my life. I'm not indignant enough to throw my overwhelming hatred at the feet of people who are dumber and in iller positions than me to try and change something. I'm not dumb enough to believe there's a “good reason” I can't overcome my behavior. And I'm certainly not hopeful or deluded enough to think that if I were on point, every day, doing every single thing I thought I needed to do along one metric or another at the highest levels that it's going to win me any friends or amount to more than the giant pile of “stuff I'm kinda familiar with” I already have in my wake. 

 

I'm a man of consequences, but only so much. I'm responsible insofar. People don't respond to my asks to be something more, and nobody's asking me in return. So this blog will do. I can wave my pass at the fast food window. I can floss, or not. Shower, tomorrow. Wait until I've got 3 or 5 more paychecks before I “try” again. Why investigate my hand or get my gums checked out? I don't have health insurance. Why get in shape? I've never needed to before, and am not quite sure I want a prolonged experience of this kind of empty and unmotivated baseline. Why eat up the extra hour of my day trying to “eat healthy” when I'm always left unsatisfied, hungry, and food goes to waste? Who am I eating healthy for? What example am I setting?

 

I don't have the disgust or guilt requisite to sustain these kind of changes. I need ideas. I need something to believe in. I need to see forward progress or the impact I have on others. And, I don't. I'm my little string of words and billable hours and Trakt hours counters. Occasionally, I wake up refreshed and uncharacteristically happy and clear-headed. Then I talk to someone. Then I get that shitty email. Then I remember what a car accident could do to my mild stability. Cheers with the expensive beer and pass the cheeseburger. Sure, I'll get around to that 2 minute task tonight around 11:30 after I've walked the dog, played drums with empty water bottles, and pretended to be more incensed by the implosion of the country after some article I read. It doesn't get better.