[757] Natural Disaster Artist

I’m so “mildly everything” right now as my mind shoots between past thoughts and recent experiences that I think it’s time to dig.

I’ve finished my “training” at DCS. As the time went by, people loosened up more and more and those true colors started leaking through. Dress got more relaxed, pretty grievances started to surface, and the reality of our collective situation was no more epitomized than when a group presenting a mock case got reprimanded for their parody lyrics after being encouraged to be creative in their presentation on the very last day. It’s The State, ladies and gentlemen. I’m surprised you didn’t see the stick up its ass from miles away.

There were several “strong” personalities, including mine, in the class. I got to watch with the wisdom of knowing what happens already, as how I managed to integrate myself, or not, into different conversational circles. Again, older people like me. I stayed polite in playing games I find incredibly boring or biting my tongue on what would otherwise be an endless stream of jokes and commentary. There’s a handful of people I could see inviting to parties or hanging out again, but we’ll see if they’re still employed and answering their work emails even 6 months from now if I so conjured the right situation. I wasn’t so much about trading numbers.

One particularly wordy and jokey person decided to send an email out to the group about how she really enjoyed everyone and that the cohort will leave a lasting impact. I intend to getting around to writing a goofy poem in response to it. You couldn’t ask for a better example of the people who want to kind of act out using it as a shield because they really do care in more ways than they’ll let on. She also invited everyone out to drink on the second to last day, though I’m unsure who decided to attend.

With the end of the traveling, I get to settle into my townie rut. I can start regularly maintaining engagement in my distractions and practices. I can start finding my rhythm and how to disrupt it with inappropriate levels of overtime. Before that was my first foray into living that “travel a bit and visit friends” kind of life. I’m writing this from my bedroom at my dad’s house as I’ve been sort of marooned in the region after a miscommunication. Tomorrow I venture to a play before a very late drive back. Today has been needlessly spending money in an effort to distract myself and stay out of the house. I’m pausing work on the land for a month or so, so sneaking in video games, books, and a vanilla caramel chiller get to scratch spending itches.

But seriously, I’m trying to figure out how to get to the good stuff. I’ve been considerably more “functionally dead” as time goes on. I routinely envision myself strung up by my fancy belt on a door handle. I still have very little desire to connect with people in general, let alone anyone new, and even seeing some acquaintances in the mall, I did basically everything in my power to pretend I was trying to get their attention before walking the other direction. I’m an odd duck.

Part of that behavior is feeling so insular that people are again becoming flatly what they can or can’t provide me. Another polite conversation about the nothing either of us are doing or plans neither of us care about isn’t what I need. Seeing people you went to high school with get married and mall walk early Saturday morning is the kind of kick in the teeth to how “easy” it is to get comfortable and sit still.

I think a lot about people’s relationships. A trainer asked the question of our cohort, “How many of you are on your first love?” and nobody raised their hand. He was making a point about change and how hard it can be for not just our families but us as well. I make the more cynical point about the kind of desperate illusion the love story is and the power it’s had to drag us up to this point. But it was funny to see the people who didn’t know why they were in Indiana, but moved their because of their boyfriend, or who had stories about being the mom at 17 and 40 year old grandma taking tips on how to relate to their spouse from one of our book sections, or the 26 year old talk about his time in marriage counseling and girl with a 1-year old who very clearly wanted to be drunk as shit and still in college once the wheels started coming off of our group’s general civility.

It’s just lost on everyone. It’s lost that you can be forcefully and proudly yourself, and still build your life and relationships from there. Old people find themselves there sometimes by default, so they jive with me. Take no prisoners. Be honest. The “professional” world has an obligation to keep things obscure and lightly touched because they’re wielding enormous power. Society at large needs something of a baseline, sure, but if Trump has taught us anything, if you don’t protect and fight through the uncomfortable truths, you’re not just harmed by the lies, but utterly overwhelmed to the point of threatening extinction.

I have a mild post-traumatic response when I think about my stuff that got stolen. Concurrently, I have an overwhelming feeling that I don’t want “stuff.” I come in through the garage at my dad’s house and see stuff up stuff piled up. It’s been through several garage sales. Some of it is semi-useful some of the time. And this house is filled with stuff that was supposed to serve later purposes or be a part of my step-mom’s craft business. This house isn’t breathing with the lives this stuff is supposed to enable. It just feels heavier and heavier and hard to maneuver around.

That’s what my stuff was. The pieces to the coffee shop. The toys and collectables I’ve saved since childhood. The books the thieves opened one box of, threw around, and then decided they’d grabbed everything worth taking. I’m sitting with the weight of a piano I have to figure out how to pack into my space. At the heart of the acquisition of my stuff was to help enable me. I never opened a single Marvel Legend as I figured they’d be worth something one day. The same rationale left some QVC comics my grandmother bought me as well, also gone. The time and money and effort it took to get that stuff not only into my life, but onto the truck, and out to the land, just gone. My effort, my plans, and my wisdom-seeking investment behavior nullified.

Here I think about help. If I had help to establish my place earlier, I could have been out there. I could have protected my stuff. I could have made my little empire a few thousand dollars richer and extended my online sales presence. You know, the true noble goal of existence. I could continue to draw from the desperate insecurity of the past that provoked me into getting that stuff and investing myself in it when there was nothing else. I could go on and on like fires and hurricanes aren’t routinely wiping out entire lives by the thousands. I can pretend I give a fuck about them like I do what happens to me.

I guess there’s the irony. The utility and training it takes to pretend. Pretend hard enough and you’ll donate to charity and take up a noble profession. You’ll believe your just desserts in heaven are for a life well-lived and hasn’t been you jockeying to garner favor. I’ve heard a number of times from different trainers, “I have a passion for this work! It really bugs me when people are just here for the paycheck!” Because they require the nobility and dignity of their position to understand and orient themselves in the world. It’s beyond their comprehension that you could give zero fucks and do better by virtue of understanding the nature of the game. They don’t know honesty and compassion without reward, so when honesty and compassion show up brazen and “creative,” they instinctively shutter at the thought anyone would dare pay someone for their time and effort when a heart can bleed all on its own. Fuck them.

What’s funny though, I can’t really pretend. When you’re willing and able to see what I am, like the obnoxious, and older, and melancholy, that’s when my star shines. There’s a reason I seem to attract a litany of girls with severe depression and anxiety. There’s a reason I draw such visceral reactions to being consistent and persistently forthcoming in how I feel. I recognize the pretend game as death, and if I have to keep bothering with being alive, I’m not interested in dying. I only imagine myself hanging from my belt, I don’t make plans.

I keep thinking we’re, for several generations, irreparably broken. Whether it’s people feeling creeped out at the idea of picking up a phone or the obnoxious individual haze of pursuing things for the sake of things, perhaps my harking for the time spent in college becomes less about some romantic togetherness and friendship ideal, and more a recognition that that’s all there is. That’s when you’re allowed to be an individual and bounce your process off other processes. Friends are an incredibly positively selfish thing to have if you’re using them right. But what do people do instead? They pretend. They play house. They pose for Instagram. They make it incredibly hard to ever see each other again because it’s time to look for the next thing.

I don’t know what I want anymore. I wanted the struggle, and that’s been subverted by the proper form and process. I wanted to be engaged and creative, and now I’m searching for hobbies like I’m trying to pack in extra curriculars before applying to college. They say to pay for experiences, not things. What if you don’t know how to? What if your experience is so marred by your collective psychosis that no matter where you go, you’re paying for the same thing over and over until you go mad? Why do I want to be lonely and bored in a foreign country anymore than I want to be sitting alone in my field contemplating whatever there is to buy after a driveway?

Today has been one of those exercise days in really hammering down the hardest and most depressing points. I tried to be proactive. I got some slime to fix a slow leak in my tire. The head popped off, and I end up deflating the tire more. I got a magnet phone holder so I could stop precariously dancing with my fumbled phone while driving, only to lose a piece of it, somehow, into a black hole that opened in my lap. I could see the pissed away money flutter about in the aggressive wind. I was told to “ignore the barking” and “say hi, it’s about respect” as if I don’t regularly say hi or need lessons on respect and haven’t been routinely and unceremoniously ignored by the person I’m supposed to say it to for years. My working self gets to watch the step-white-trash retard in my basement play video games, still without a job, not paying rent, pissing all over the toilet, as the expectations of my household remain shackled. It happens too regularly for there not to be some metaphysical-esc being out there zeroing in on the points where the exact opposite of what should be said or did in fact happens precisely then.

I’ve been heavily restricting my diet lately too. Each day I’ve gone with a can of tuna and 4 apples. I don’t really care what you know about health and weight loss. The results are pretty dramatic even after less than a week. I’m interested in what happens when I add exercise. Part of me wants to be “default” attractive again so I can try to remain silent and/or “buff and dumb” for places like Tinder. Another part of me wants to get as close as I’m ever going to get by way of analogy to addiction. If you need meth as much as I need food, and I’m over here refraining from the hundreds and hundreds of options with my growing and growing bank account, I get to retain even less sympathy for you, and I might stumble upon some insight on how to steer your attention and behavior into another direction. If that fails, at least I’ll be skinnier and saving money regardless. But it seems, as with most things about me, it’s another behavior engaged in out of spite.

Ah ha! That was the last piece I wanted to fit in somewhere. In reminiscing about my childhood, I wonder sometimes if I was born “bad.” I don’t have a lot of insight into my childhood. I don’t have access to pictures. I don’t have family videos. My dad isn’t particularly detailed or forthcoming when I ask him about it. I still don’t talk to the cunt that bore me. I find the proposition intriguing for the consequences of pairing a bad kid with a psycho mom. Maybe it’s not all her, or her mental deficiencies’, fault. Maybe I say things like, “I don’t like helping people” or “here’s another justification for relative sociopathy” or revel in the taboo and precarious while enabling whatever pathology you have on offer because I’m bad. Maybe the world constantly signalling for me to play pretend with them has nothing to do with me as a person and everything to do with a subconscious self-preservation response about the natural disaster that is my being. If there’s a louder message I most often hear besides “you’re not a person” in so many forms, I’ve not caught it.

The insecure put me down. The scared turn what I say or do into personal affronts or redefine their laughter or buy in as something “mean” about me. The jealous avoid. And it isn’t even about them. I’m the storm. I’m a knotted ball of cancerous karma keeping myself stuck between personalities like theirs and an unforgiving world in the face of my best efforts and investments. They’re blips in my blogs and I’m still the writer. The work gets to be here even if I’ll never be.