[756] Positivity Doctrine

I think this can be more of a “for the record” kind of reiteration and blurb.

Once again, someone who does not know me and can't help but hear me has used the “n” word about me. (This being the disembodied voice of whomever sits next to Byron's cubicle.) I said some disparaging thing about a piece of shit person doing a piece of shit thing, and the party line was recited. “Think positive! Positivity!” I learned later that she expressed to Byron that my words signaled a red flag for whether or not I would survive in a job like that given the nature of the work and “if he doesn't care” about the people. Byron laughed it off, reassured her he's known me for 20 years, and that my outside gruff exterior is probably just some form of coping mechanism not to be taken too seriously.

Clearly, I still have someone not exhausted yet at the prospect of defending me, but her concern raised a different angle to the question of my “negativity.” She was worried I didn't care. For her, the words mattered more than anything I might accomplish or how I actually feel. There's similarities to how it's usually deployed, but at least this one was literally thinking of the children lol.

I'm learning that the “most negative actually most positive” method of approach to the world is utterly wasted on people at large. Little did she know or care that the person she was talking to, and his supervisor, and the people in our little pod, are all cut from the same cloth. Me, slow to office politics, didn't realize there's a special corner and offices for general comments and sentiments like mine.

The larger giant and most important point remains the same. Whatever I say, and damn knows I can constantly and annoyingly continue to say it, both in spite and celebration of things you never want to talk about, my DOING and general life circumstances are still regal. Have you forgotten I spent a good portion of my time after college sleeping and waking up whenever I wanted? That's as magnificent as cats have it. You know I'm still on the trajectory to having a jokingly small conception of “bills?” I'm too fat. I'm typing this on a big screen from a custom computer loaded with 6 hard drives and plugged into an external power supply just in case I need an extra hour or so if the power goes out. Opulence doesn't begin to describe it.

And every day now I get to interact with people who have roaches, smell weird, struggle to take care of kids, and get put through a system that maybe evenly splits the ones it might help verses exploit. Can you have that much sympathy when my extraneous stuff I've left in a moving van for almost 2 years in a field goes missing? It's immoral and makes you feel vulnerable, but then now aren't I more in line with the general circumstances of the world? Do any of my, often mocked and poorly regarded “problems” ever make the radar? The pants buttons on both of my dress pants popping off? The hassle of returning things to Amazon? My new shoes getting stained? My shampoo running out without time to get more at my hotel?

Nothing, never, that I do will be less than an incredibly rich person making a series of gambles on how he can make even bigger bets and investments. My parents commute/d an hour or more to work every day, and they didn't come back to their paid-off home. When I can actually start stockpiling and investing again, every cent that helped me I'll be able to start turning back out in repaying or whatever else. Mostly, I'll get to celebrate the perspective that taught me I could do a fuck ton beyond merely survive with $500 to $2000 if I did the math and stayed realistic about what life did or didn't owe me.

I don't know man, the prospect of the next economic crash and knowing that I'd have a hard time fucking up my circumstances even if I tried just has me excited. I wish more people could be a part of it. I guess they're too busy being positive and living their best lives.

[755] Supermassive Black Whole

I have to bite the bullet and start writing. Standard disclaimer, this is gearing up to be disorganized.

If I could only sleep I wouldn't be thinking of ways to get into trouble. You see, since I started “behaving,” a few things have started to line up. I've already paid my way to a house with power and water, and could likely afford what it'd take to keep it air conditioned. If the weather wasn't shit, it'd probably be done already, and this “1 week/2 year” project will finally be a place I can live in for the cost of a paycheck from anywhere for a week or 2's of work for a year. Then I get to merrily solve all the next problems of landscaping and monetizing.

You see, I got a job. It doesn't pay any more or less than I was doing with drug studies or in my over-working of menial tasks. I got a “job job.” I put on dress clothes. I get off at 4:30. I can get overtime. A good $200 or so is taken from my check for insurance and my responsibilities range from investigator to testifier to counselor. I have an established rhythm and a dozen people at once to collaborate with and answer to. I'm at the rock bottom place I figured I'd have to go for income once I exhausted my options that let me sleep when I wanted or leave when the mood struck me.

And I'm trapped. It's a familiar trap. It's the trap that molded much of the animal I am today. I spend the vast majority of my time around people who take 20 words when 2 would suffice. This habit so as to remain polite and not hurt anyone's feelings. This so we can all coexist like civilized beings with our singular focus. Help the children. The madness of our era and nexus of forces that result in the addictions and abuses can be addressed with 12 weeks of training, 2 years to “really pick it up” and a “positive” spirit about the impact we're having. No matter where you go, that last bit is always the most important.

I've never gotten anywhere with positivity. Positivity is abused and disguised as indulgence, and predictably, it's one of my largest criticisms of the world around me. “Let us eat cake.” Cake, and everything else around us as what's for lunch becomes a question of existential proportions. Any structure, by virtue of its being, suggests a specific kind of weight, attraction, and indulgence. How you respond to it says everything. Pride in what you're doing with an inability to question is false and dangerous. Insulating yourself instead of informing from cues in the outside environment is poisonous and suffocating.

I understand the impulse to immediate mockery when someone introduces the “big picture” into whatever little thing it is you're doing in the classroom. “Well, what do you want me to do about it? Institutional poverty you say? Ha! I wish everyone had mansions and loved each other too!” I understand this is an avoidance and fear response. It's “too much” to think about, and misplaced dog piles of information will only destroy what you're hoping to accomplish. That is, unless you're enmeshed in this blog and just want to be able to sleep ;).

My insistence for a “reality based” conversation, always, is because it helps. It helps during and after it hurts. It helps to know that people do not behave like it says on the screen and the book. It helps to know that you're wasting money paying children to get in over their heads and know full-well you're not paying them enough to tough it out. It helps when you speak to your legislators about what their priorities should be and how they should frame new policy and appropriate funds. It helps in providing a diverse way of getting people information and allowing them to respond and work with it. The irony to work so hard, spend so much time, and waste so many words when you actually care feels deadly. To take statistically inevitable “wins” as evidence of your accomplishments feels cheap and dishonest.

In this cold judgmental and dead real world is where I find every ounce of inspiration and drive. I don't believe anything ever is going to work. So when it finally does, it gets to sit with me, not like some cheap momentary high, but like a piece of me has fallen into place I won't be able to break no matter how hard I or life tries. If what I'm doing doesn't feel like it's in service to those pillars, I find myself either doing exercises that try to choke my life down, or find myself indulging in things I would otherwise enjoy if I didn't feel I was only distracting myself and being safely self-destructive. I don't need a night out, $40 worth of video games, or even cheap quick and terrible meals “because I can afford it.” I need to be in the mud of my land. I need to be learning the technology for the creation and promotion of things that haven't left my mind for years.

And I know this. And you know this. And it's going to be the singular song I sing until I get what I want. I need a whole host of other things as well, and the introspection that comes along with learning various levels of depravity has brought back old themes and stories into my head. Man oh man did I wish a DCS worker would have come into my school as a kid and explained “emotional abuse” is a real thing and not normal. Surely any ardent reader is acquainted with my flippant, cold, and disgruntled nature with regard to how people exercise those emotions. No doubt my capacity to ridicule, joke, and shut down are great homages to acquired protective mechanisms. Anyone remember the story of my mom gutting one of my stuffed animals she made me pick and bring to her?

That instance in particular has been in my head a lot recently. I started thinking of people who genuinely suffer conditions and trauma that they have no real way of explaining to people but for the often dramatic and painful consequences of their behavior. I started wondering to what degree my “general behavior” is potentially an extension of a form of “inexorable” trauma. These thoughts were prompted because of a completely simultaneous thought regarding, for lack of a better way to say it yet, “how I feel.” That, or how I consistently managed to conjure within myself when what I value seems to exist in other people.

I'll try to be more explicit. I really like the people I like. I really liked my toys and stuffed animals. I really liked the games and characters that stuck with me and helped model my behavior. I really like being the genuine best at something, and being right, and knowing how to get things done even as I'm suffering every moment around legions of people who don't or pretend they don't. Another way to state that, it's real to me. If you're trying to make a case against suicide, you'd take from the laundry list of things that have filled me with every ounce of everything there is to feel about them. That's certain party situations and great conversations, it's weird convergence circumstances that seem to confirm an instinct, it's the stream of jokes from a room of real-enough mother fuckers just being without thinking about mopping up and politicking leaking feelings from those that don't get it.

I've really cared about ex girlfriends and fuck-buddies. I wasn't going through the motions of “relationship” for a check next to the box so I could get more street cred in the eyes of the broken single mom scouring OKCupid for me. I really like that there's at least some measure of consequences and accountability being reintroduced to our culture for sex-offenders and those utterly terrified we're actively spiraling off the cliff of existence. I'm interested in seeing more. I'm chomping at bits of a chance to be of immense consequence myself and hopefully enable the people I recognize as doing it like I would. All of this is as deeply true and “hopeful,” if I have to borrow the word, and motivating and “positive” as you could ask for, but I only recognize it in contrast to a kind of baseline despair.

I know, deeply, that no matter how much you care or are devoted to something, at more scales and by more metrics than not, it doesn't matter. Broadly, the universe will swallow it up. Earthly, you aren't in control of the mechanisms of power beyond the attention you garner in the streets or the hell you might raise locally. Interpersonally, not a single person you meet might ever retain your kind of values as deeply or for as long as they're required. Personally, your mind sees your dead friend in a million fluffy pieces as cold, ignorant (worse, maybe not even that ignorant), malicious retribution reigns out on you independent of your own innocence or ignorance. Predators shoot for babies.

And that's what we are. For what we're required to do to perpetuate the species, even the dumbest of the dumb and meanest of the mean could be considered hyper-intelligent. I've pointed out the numerous kids these addicts and abusers have, and the one or two, accidents, who ever pop up in my feed from my circle of friends. We're refined down to the facial tick to figure each other out, crack each other open, and extract what we want. For those of us who don't seem to figure that out, or resent those that do, we revert to our basic ravaging form. We kill or be killed. The objects of the game are just that and it is, after all, just a game. In my mind, they play the easy version like using cheat codes and super weapons to kill everyone in a room on your “covert” mission.

That's the realm of the drinking, parties, social media cultivation, and cliche-adjacent “relationship goals” and over-indulgence at work or in hobbies. I can't express the depths of how ceaselessly boring it is to see that people know how to drive or catch a plane and look at nature. You'll never hear that the 12 hour trip resulted in seeing a long lost friend where the conversation never clicked and you forced smiles through their shitty, but polite, vegan dinner they offered you. You'll never hear the list of insane things you tried to fight about that your partner ignored or disregarded because they can't be bothered or are as equally afraid of being alone and pushing things as you. You always get the story, the filter, and the praise, because don't forget, the likes and hearts and positivity are the most important part.

I want hard mode. I want commitment to mean more than “love.” I want honesty to speak to the endless spring of invincible motivation and dialogue verses the brilliant play and distillation. I want the boredom to feel boring and the whoredom to express its ridiculous and arbitrary whims. I want each piece of the struggle of your day-to-day “reality” to be speaking towards or welded to the largest conception you have of yourself. I don't want safe words. Civility, structure, tradition, and the language compiled from every Hallmark card have their place AFTER you lay down an empty and even universal truth to root your impossibly amazing ego. Then you can accept things for what they are and merely look like a contradiction in living in spite of it all instead of celebrating the infinite void.

It should make you sick to want to run. You should shake when you're told to sit still. You should be ready to burst and actively lookout for the obscene and absurd that would deny you even exist. You should antagonize and invest. You should commit to everything worth exhausting yourself over and every moment with every person that's reminding you of what to keep looking for. There's a million cultural stories and jobs on offer to fill in the blanks and do all of the work for you. There's every reason to forget why you got started or where you want to be. There's a rhythm and a pattern for you just as soon as for every particle in your body that you'll never see or feel, but will carry you along. I'm never so sure of the origin and necessity of my antagonist being than when I hop in that unconscious stream.

So maybe consider it a warning and a point of light. I'm keeping away because I don't destroy for destruction sake unless it has to do with myself. I'll really like you, and I'm just not a dope or naive or hopeful enough that anyone, let alone you, “gets it” without the kind of conversation, honesty, and introspective exploration that I'm compelled to do, and urge everyone to practice. I'm an entire universe, and so are you, and when they meet, it's a fantastic explosion annihilation/creation event that we treat with niceties. If you think that's hyperbolic, I have to ask what's your scale. I already know who I am to the personal conversations you'll have in your head about me, mostly because they don't stay in your head. I also know that no matter how good I look in dress clothes, I'm not a good fit for interpersonal for interpersonality's sake. I'm just a car in traffic on Earth who can barely shape and inhabit 5 acres. To me, universe unto myself feels appropriately wise and cautious. It's got the most room to explore, it's ever-expanding, and it can fit every smaller conception of what it can or should be within.

[754] Cough

I don't think there is an amount of “civilizing” that I could go through that would ever erase my underlying need to lose my shit.

I guess that's a topic to start with.

I like obstruction. I like absurdity. I like random. I want whatever you expect to be something of a left turn and force you to sit on the kind of precarious edge that I do with regard to my expectations. I'm well aware the world absolutely can and does operate in predictable ways for years if not lifetimes for some people. I want to be prepared for shit to pop off any moment.

I told my friend not too long ago that with every passing day, I'm not just an atheist, but I believe in a god less and less. Each moment seems to insist on the absolute absurdity of existence in and of itself, and the relative freedom I have to respond to it as I please doesn't for a second endear me to some supernatural being grading my behavior on some ethereal scale.

This seems like the point.

Think about it. I work in a field where I get to hear daily about how family members fuck about with their children. God doesn't chime in on their paperwork. They know, like you know, somewhere in the back of your head there's a reminder that God isn't watching and you're probably going to get away with it. That's, of course, the conversation I'm interested in. What happens and why do you make the decision otherwise when there are no rules? That's my, and seemingly every other atheist's reality, so why not society at large? I don't need eternal damnation to prevent me from touching up a child, nor do I ignore that for the vast majority of human history we were perfectly fine with marrying off adolescents like a business transaction. How do you think that history should go forward but with honest conversation exposing details that feel “icky?”

Maybe I just feel old. I don't want to do obscene “stand out” things, but I'm hard-pressed to pretend my nature isn't contrarian. Something or another of my identity is involved in “the shit” and poor good story but bad otherwise decision making. But god forbid I force it. Obscene for obscenity's sake looks bad at any age. Even as I adopt the pace and tone of my domesticators, I can't help but believe in my capacity to burn it all down on a whim. I need to know that, worry about that, and believe that about myself. I'm never along for the ride.

Even tonight, I'm not as drunk as I thought I “should” be. I'm not as belligerent and angry in some incoherent blog as I thought I was gearing up for. I'm just annoyed I have the hiccups and have run out of anti-inflammatories that are going to speak to my budding headache in the morning. I'm not excited or amped up. I didn't have a conversation worth telling you about. I'm not even in some “escape” from the drudgery of my “training” for the new job. I'm probably as arbitrary a variable as I was a sixth grader in February. I have no memories of that time, and you have no reason to regard me now for the same reasons.

I started writing though because I still maintain an indignant posture. I'm not the one to be surprised by some cliché mid-life crisis. I don't cry over friends I simply haven't bothered to call but we arguably would have nothing to say to each other for months or years at a time anyway. I think it's just that I'm too smart and I figured it all out a long time ago. You have to be all about it right now. You have to be honest. You have to insist and try and sacrifice and get it all for the memories and moments as they come, because it's all right now, and it's all over as soon as it comes. I'm here, where I always am, right now, floating through memories and trying to be more let down by the bar scene than I even care to invest, perpetually looking for what I've already had in abundance. If you don't recognize and retain, it only gets worse.

[753] Applecart

I've been waiting to sense a certain kind of moment for several weeks. I think it just clicked, and it was one of those that gives you the title to what you're about to write before it's written.

I'm not even halfway through my “training” to be a DCS Family Case Manager. Entire days, excuse me, “work days,” are devoted to interviewing and paperwork and navigating these big confusing machines colloquially understood as “computers.” Just like my last job, they make it feel very large and “official” by paying for hotel stays and asking for business casual. Our I.D. badges ensure only those with the proper credentials get behind the proper doorways. The classroom dynamics and politi-speak of the trainers are what anyone “normal” would expect.

I understand there are important reasons for this. The nature of the job is to intervene in the lives of otherwise sovereign individuals. If you don't even look or sound like you have your shit together, things explode immediately. I also understand that on a very large timeline of human behavior and experience, these bland offices and formalized speech can be considered revolutionary and downright magical. You can consider a tie or belt variations on a leash theme, and I probably wouldn't disagree with you, but the vast majority of dogs I've encountered need better training on how to operate on one.

To be sure, this isn't about “office culture.” Every half-rate and occasional slam dunk media portrayal of that life and its satirization abound. This is about the mental passivity and “security” spell it puts you under. You can be as wild and indignant as I've historically been routinely accused of, and still find yourself under it. The real click happens when you think about what may disturb it. When you fear you won't have your access, or consistent check, or colleague banter. When the veneer gives way to the seedy underbelly of your mind that knows it will have to contend with everything going unverbalized.

This is a job that has a high turnover rate. Simultaneously, they want you to be informed and cheerleading for the long-term transformation of families living in varying degrees of crisis. Two fundamentally at odds with each other positions that are both very loud and very obvious across layers of the organization. A key point of insistence from one of my training days was getting to the “underlying needs” of the client. It's one thing to pop into someone's life, give them a few months of obligations for them to comply with, and then the moment you step out, they're right back to the meth, or violence, or broadly understood “neglect.”

And fair enough. A capacity and willingness to change, if it ever “really” happens a philosophical presupposition for another day, takes time. But the formal atmosphere doesn't allow for the meat of the discussion to get tenderized. These people are poor, exhausted, and often suffering from generational abuse. Their “informal supports” are legions upon legions of people who have not just “normalized” pathological behavior, but celebrate it and build it into their traditions and parallel formal structures. I think of cartels operating like Fortune 500 companies; the parallels are broader and darker than anyone cares to discuss. As well, the gaps in human knowledge and capacity aren't even part of the conversation, let alone identified as a prevailing root issue. Dumb oblivious people cause immense consequences, and some very particularly dumb and oblivious ones have disproportionate effects on the system at large.

Here's where the applecart comes in. They have theirs. We, in our “normal society” posture, have ours. Neither want to be disturbed. We want to eat to our hearts content every kind of apple available to us. For them, it's the conflicting self-destruction and rewards of being enmeshed in drugs, sex, and the proclivities of their culture. For us, it's being smarter and luckier about the conflicting self-destruction and rewards of being enmeshed in drugs, sex, and the proclivities of our culture.

I'm not trying to equivocate. I don't think you neglect, nor would neglect, children in your care like these people do. I'm not saying you're as addicted to meth as the person who fluidly lies about all of the meth fairies sprinkling it on their fries and weed. Nor do I think the poor assumptions much of modernity rests on are as destructive as the kind of jungles constructed by myriad negative forces associated with poverty and abuse. What I will say, is that at the individual level, people across the board pick their poison and pretend it isn't slowly killing them and everyone around them.

Let's be less abstract. Damn near everyone at the training building is overweight. For me, it's one of the most immediate indications that there's a problem you don't care to engage with that rests at the heart of implications for other problems. I also differentiate between the weight that happens from getting older or having kids from being fat, nor do I confuse different body types with “giving up.” I can have a big ass and still not know 3 weeks in advance I'm definitely sitting out the company kickball game.

Less obvious than ballooning bodies is inflated pride. These people, and trainers in particular, are proud of the work they do. “Despite the struggles” they know they are “helping.” Their success stories aren't a matter of statistics and what might happen anyway, they testify to their capacity and professionalism. Things are getting better! New language and evolving training materials ensure that the pain points in conversation will result in the eventual better outcomes of our families. From our “strengths-based” perspectives, we can build teams and plans that will see families reunited. Meanwhile, at the desks of the new students, and in every regional office, you'll never find more condescending and dark humor regarding the people you're dealing with.

I feel I've been resisting the urge to adopt the “negative” moniker of my disposition as a badge of pride. I cannot persuade myself that it is wise or necessary to equate “reality” with “negativity.” I also don't mean that as though I have some sort of special claim or license to dictate reality. It's more akin to a notion of “common sense.” If I point to a hand and call it a hand, and you retort “No! It's a wondrous splendiforous jerk-off orgasm machine!” I mean, okay, sure? Saying we're likely to have a fleetingly small if perhaps negative impact in how we conduct our affairs as long as we ignore the roots of poverty and addiction, or at least sideline them and refer to them as “framed too negative” to be discussed intelligently, is not me dismissing our potential or putting your shaping of the matter down.

Shifting gears a bit and more personally, if I seem to have an “insistent” posture, I think it's a reaction to all that's insisted upon me. No, I don't need to be “hopeful” to do my job, as one trainer suggested, I need to be realistic. My responsibility to child welfare transcends unyielding deference to the machine and properly worded note sheets. This means I can work within the confines of my job and give voice to other avenues I've identified as having a greater or tangible impact than my disposition. I try to maintain a sense of immediacy in my mind because, if not now, when? If you don't call the shitty food your eating shit, you definitely won't find yourself working out that afternoon. If you don't recognize your excuse not to engage with something that “sounds negative” you'll sit comfortably on the mantel of things you've awarded yourself for.

I have my under-construction house in the middle of nowhere because for years, “right now” has been when I've worried about not having something like a pension or ability to afford the inevitable medical bills or space to express creative energy that remains important to my energy and vitality. I'm only a month or 2 away of dedicated focus to reach a relative peak in fitness because no matter how far removed I am from ultimate Frisbee games or consistent gym attendance, I'm never spiraling or complacent. The truth of who you are or need to be has staying power. It's memories that don't go away. It's pain worth engaging when the topic arises. It was true when you were 5 and will be true when you're 95. Actually dying is just a part of life, but subverting yourself to a parsed mockery of the whole truth that's required to thrive is the kind of sinful suicide that mostly only dresses or talks differently depending on where and how you grew up.