I consistently feel gross when I watch someone's tragedy on a reality TV platform. My first impulse is to ask, “Where would the soul of our country be if we couldn't find deformed or ugly people to sing for us?” There's been at least one trending story about “The Dr.s” basically stringing along someone who's face was eaten by cancer. The struggle fodder for a “look how we can fix you!” narrative. It's the general and pervasive sense that “people,” in their struggle or talent are a kind of redemption that will save us all. We can't talk about “exploiting” people we're “uplifted” by. We can't ask questions about who's getting paid what and by what standard they're judging. We'd rather cry in solidarity for the voice of an angel we'll silence in ourselves in a second if it kept us looking “normal” and “average.”
We're not out of the woods because there are stirrings of excited Left rhetoric and sense seeping through. The consequences of our obsequious relationship to what's shiny and full of feels is still the beating heart of our internal narrative. Trump backlash is not a substitute for knowledge, and game shows are not a substitute for genuine empathy through shared struggle. The scars or boils are still there, but we'd rather pretend not to look. Another story of a veteran who had no one going to his funeral made its rounds before thousands showed up last minute. Good thing we're so inclusive and accountable to the living in the meantime.
I'm restless. Like an old and worn pattern, I find a smidgen of positive feeling for my potential and the future, and like an addiction, my head pounds with wanting more than I have in front of me. Part of me is concerned that I've genuinely managed to render “positivity” as a form of good feelings into malady. I can't handle believing in myself and not watching myself carry out what's on my mind. I can read the book on how to build an underground house for $50. At 11pm on a Monday, I kinda wanna be outside digging, at least two shovel-fulls enough to know I don't really want to be digging.
It's at least a two part problem. One, I can kinda solve this way. I want to talk. I don't want it to just be pressure behind my eyes. Taking action, sometimes horribly wrong and distracting for distraction sake, is the second often sought solution. It's immensely gratifying to see even slivers of progress on something, whatever it is, whenever it registers as progress. I don't want to achieve one more episode. My eyes are strained from reading before I started this. I don't know that I'm tired enough mentally or physically to not just find myself like this trying to write myself into an excuse to shut down.
That part I try hardest to forget is how fast I work relative to other things. That's something I kind of appreciate about the State. It's slow by design. It lasts because it takes an exacting understanding of its various machinations, and you have to literally dedicate enough of yourself to appreciate it or it will eat you. The private world is where you get the Wild West potential and narrative. I've moved to the Wild West, and my obligations and training are all to do with the “real” kind of world. I know there are alternatives. I know I'm of the spirit and capacity to make big dramatic overnight change. I know not all change is good change, and I don't want to treat myself like an angsty loaded weapon.
What I see is like trying to describe the parties, or, at least what the parties were to me. You had to be there. You had to hear THAT person tell a certain kind of joke. You had to taste the once-in-a-lifetime concoction from the blender. I could build things that only I could build! My house could be a greater extension of my identity than some floor plan or generally accepted convention. I could have something to sell in that it's individuated and wise beyond some hippie arrogance or the purview of an introverted recluse. A number of times I've echoed the line, “be the change you want to see in the world.” And I could! I could do it every night after work. I could do it all weekend. I could do it in the rain or cold. I could build it into my hopeless budget that pretends I can't be debt free in a year.
Can you not see how every waking moment isn't at least a mild hell not being able to do so? Do you realize how much deeper I will breath when I'm NEVER told to turn down my music or TV show again? When I can make little Insta-stories of holes getting deeper or walls going up or materials I've found to recycle and create something new with? What more could you ask for than the freedom to express yourself? I mean, once you've accepted you're going to bother to keep on living and are honest with yourself about how little a “helping others posture” does for you when you've no idea what it is people really need. It's a process.
I don't think it's that I'm impatient either. I think there were people inventing and creating and devouring well before we had “instant gratification” as if that's what Googling and YouTube are providing us. It's almost instant, and I wouldn't equate placation with gratitude. I think it's that I'm indignant. When I start having more examples testifying to my myth, I'll be that much angrier I couldn't get people to help or play along. I'll have that much more judgment and resentment for the paths people pursued out of fear or weak approximations at adequate judgment and criticism. That anger certainly has to blend into the mix of the pain behind my eyes. I'm perpetually scowling at a world I'm dying to work incredibly hard to exist more parallel than perpendicular to.
What? 9 days I'm back to “even” brokeness after paying off the credit card. 2 weeks after that I can take half my check and do who knows what with. 2 weeks after that I start contemplating paying the rest of my car payments for the year, or internet bill, or for the means and supplies to build a garage. 2 weeks after that I send a stupid text or facebook message to a friend I'm probably still not going to see despite some wiggle room. How quickly a month and a half goes, and I'll be, maybe, settled into my must-be-cleaned space, weather providing, most days getting used to the idea that I'm the only person in the country without a gun.
If I build it, will they come? No, but at least I'll have built it.
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