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.
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