[796] Friendly Wager

I'm purely writing because I have a headache. Stupid thoughts about the future crept in.

I can feel how I've anchored my thoughts to the paycheck. I think to myself, “I can't do anything until...” or, “In 3 paychecks I'll be back to 'evenly broke.” I don't look for things to spend money on in between. I don't try to distract myself. I've zeroed in on paying off the credit cards, and then paycheck number 4 or 5, right around my birthday, I'll have “profit.” I'm hyper-obsessed with the dollar amounts at this point. Always in theory, I can start blowing money on nearly anything in the relatively short term. Here's $500 for more website work, why not? Here's a shit ton of supplies for the next room, or deck, or $600 to play on an excavator for a weekend.

My head is rushing to every possibility at once, because I haven't chosen. Part of me knows I'm perfectly content having what's “functional.” My clothing is an impressive assortment from things I got when they were too big to fit me right, to free and handed out at rallies or bars. Just like I never needed to bother getting a six pack to get laid, I never had to bother looking particularly fashionable. And then there's the whole impossible struggle with ever really giving a fuck what people think. You know, insofar as that can go for us normal adults.

Is there something to be gained if I were to just stop? Say I pay down this debt, and just pay my bills at the normal rate, and concentrate on stomaching the comforts as I've been enjoying them. Mind you, that's eating out and not thinking about the price of movie tickets, but it's not nothing. Is it enough? My mind and body say no before I begin typing the sentence. Why isn't it enough? Does it matter? Don't people tend to envy the drive (compulsion)? Don't I still have something to prove? Am I not still an indignant spite-filled ball of fuck you?

Of course I am. And any time I write a series of nonsense questions I don't intend to answer, nor have anyone address, it's because I'm lost in the sea of all of the things I'd be attempting to do with an ounce of access and dash of boredom. To not be able to help yourself to the creation of the future you imagine is not the same thing as an addiction to smoking. I mean, similar brain regions may be at play, but theoretically I'm not stressing myself out to the point of courting cancer in equal measure.

Maybe I'm just feeling exhausted with trying to account for it all. It's truly an impossible task to try and capture what happens when my mind hits “go.” It speaks to doing a dozen things at once, every drunk rant, and every brief glimpse at happiness for having pulled something off that seemed a world away. I'm surprised I don't routinely break out in tears every time I flip on the lights and adjust the temperature in my house. They were some of the smallest and relatively straight-forward things to account for that contributed an entire world of relief and appreciation I wasn't anticipating. Every ounce of mental satisfaction I ever discover, I will have desperately clawed from the abyss.

If people are the answer, I don't know what to make of finding the one's nearest me so...wanting. I don't know why I'm expected to pick up slack, but when need done so, I'm unreasonably insisted upon. I don't know why the sins of the past get erased for those with expectations of me, but my memory gets to be faulty and not trusted. I don't know why it felt like my duty and joy to entertain those who only grew in their resentment, why it's someone like my dad's obligation to forgive, or why those who seem to give and care need to feed the void of endless sacrifice.

Check the tapes. I was hoping for an oasis where all of the desperate, depressed, broke friends could live cheap. My first instinct was to build a house bigger than I needed so I could retain the people I had under my roof. Byron recalled, “Sometimes I think back and wonder, what went wrong?” Half joking, half not, when we went to the land to drop of the TVs, wondering what drove me out there. The story is written in excruciating detail. I don't know how you can miss it.

I want to retain or put my money to work. I want to be able to invite and account for those I claim to care about. I want to live the example of the kind of people I'd like to know more of. Those willing to sacrifice, and work, and focus, and live for their actual dreams instead of their negotiated realities. I want people who revel in their discomfort, because reprieve means victory over a worthy foe. I want people to believe in themselves and what they can accomplish as much as I do. It was supposed to be a reinforcing feedback loop and launch pad. It was supposed to be chances to safely testify and contribute to a shared future that wasn't marred by our hellish politics and doom for the future. There were many secrets and things to learn in pursuing this house and land. I always knew I could “work a job” and get paid to dress up and pretend.

I feel I've been in this shell for so long. The realities of doing the coffee shop in the mall crashed into me. The reality of having people who give no fucks beyond their next meal and digital racecar soccer match in my life. Increasingly, I feel totally removed from the arbitrary grabs at power Byron is pursuing, seemingly on point until he gets as bored as I do and casually adopts a new uniform or agenda. But I'm supposed to take him more seriously than he takes me?

Yes, buried in here is frustration for him as well, as his insistence regarding my move-out timeline and progress for nondescript “plans” is making me feel, well, whatever is less connotatively impactful than “mentally abused.” I'm pretty sure he somewhat resents how much I want to get away. (Every girl I've ever dated and offended friend to the point of broken relationship has their jaw drop through the floor at the audacity.) He's turning bully, I'm turning him into the litany of people I've had to learn to disregard. It's crass to reduce a 20+ year relationship to the last task you needed help with in moving TVs right? Here's to everyone forgetting my floor is what happened between me and my mom. Obviously, I was broken early, and none of you are safe. But feel free to look back through the record on which of us deviated from the reasonably predictable mean. Shit, more irony, he's as predictable as me.

Meantime. I need meaningful time. Lucky for me, even if I don't have friends, I'm going to get to see friends on Thursday and over the weekend. I'll get to do the mentally placating thing of “taking back” my agency by calling in a sick day (oooh naughty!). #fuckingkillme. I'm craving the day to day of physically chopping away at the challenges the land presents me. How many holes there are left to dig! I have a giant pile of shit I need to light on fire and not let get out of control! I need more bathroom, less dusty mud pit! In the (mean)time, I'll keep chugging along at work. Turns out, I actually am perfectly suited for this kind of gig in everything but driving philosophy. Collected crazy can commune with crazy in a tone that isn't condescending and with an underlying threat that doesn't provoke lashing out that wasn't coming anyway. It's still weird to be so perfectly and ill-suited at the same time.

If it's any consolation, I don't know why it would be, I feel less “rushing all over the place to nowhere” than I did before I started. My head still hurts and I’m still clenching, but, you know.

[795] First To Last

I'm pausing halfway through one of, if not the, best episode of Game of Thrones I've seen. I don't even know if this will have anything to do with the show, but this is feeling like the thing I need to do before I finish it.

I went to a bookstore today. I looked around and then eventually asked if they had the two latest Firefly books. The cute hippie-adjacent girl said they didn't have anything by the author, and then said, “You know, if it's meant to be, it'll be.” She smiled, and settled back into her, what I take to be generally chill life and work task at hand. Of course, as pleasurable a sentiment as I'm sure that is for her own life, I'm moved to disagree. Before she offered that sentiment, she said they could order it if I wanted. I'd also bet that she's heard of Amazon. I also already have the books on Kindle.

Nothing, to me, is “meant to be.” The essence of the drama and perpetual confusion in life is that things are indefinite and indeterminate. We're watching. We're watching our favorite shows, and watching the stories play out in our books. We're fictionalizing our past and present in order to cope and move past and generate “Hang in there baby!” sentiments to usher later generations along. You weren't meant to find your spouse or have your kids. You weren't meant to find a lost kitten and nurse it back to health. It wasn't written in the clouds that I was to walk out of that bookstore without hard copies.

If it was, “responsibility” wouldn't be a thing. “Justice” would be a laughable notion. “Progress” would be impossible. That is to say, all of that could also be true, and I'm flatly upside down on your God's vision for us all. Fine, but then the conversation's over, you don't get to lament either of us ending up in hell, and you've without irony robbed your savior of the reason to forgive people. That things aren't meant to be is what makes them special and worth fighting for. That things could go in more directions than you could imagine is why we continue to watch familiar themes in different worlds. Even if it's an old joke to consider which Game of Thrones characters are going to die anymore, you still don't know. Even if I know which Firefly characters have died, I still don't know what's in store for who's left.

What you don't know is what keeps you going. The fork interaction where someone you meet wisps you away. The state you find yourself in after enough new or difficult experiences. I was reading old blogs. So much of myself is still right here in what I wrote 7 or more years ago. I'm still hashing the same fights, carrying the same stress, still befuddled beyond befuddlement at how so much could go so wrong, while I otherwise seem to enjoy a regal, albeit with the loneliness of a king, life. I don't know what tomorrow brings. I don't know when I'll find myself no longer clenching my jaw. I don't know how quickly things can shift to dramatically worse or better. A car swerved into my lane today as I was coming back from the land. The driver completely ran me off the road in order for me to avoid getting hit. Her, teary-eyed and shaking, I catch up with 30 yards up the road and learn it stalled and she lost control, my initial anger immediately quashed.

It happens that quickly. That's the kind of danger and death scenarios always at play in my head. That's how I stopped getting “shocked” when one of my favorite characters dies. We're already dead. We're already living the high-stakes shootout depicted a thousand times. We're screaming out our battle cry with every painful experience and doubt, and defying the gods by continuing to exist. When you invest yourself and your experience that dramatically, you can let everyone die around you, because the larger war with death is here.

I almost got it perfectly wrong the other night. I thought I was going to write my first blog from the land, annoyed that I couldn't get moving as fast as I wanted in dropping off my TVs. I wanted to arrange and pay out the ass to do something “unnecessarily now.” And I wanted to take the indifferent posture of those around me as a deep hatred for me. I forget that it's never really personal. However selfish and insistent I think I might be, I'll never compare to the world around me. My battle, my story, has to remain that. My war is how I'm killing myself.

For all of my words over the years, it occurred to me that I've never invented one. Everything about “me” is a collection of things, abstracts, grunts and sounds handed down to me. What if I didn't have language? Who would I think I was? What if every single “why” had to manifest as a course of action in the world to find out the result? It's a trippy place to consider. How many horrible words could you use to beat yourself up with if you didn't know them? How meaningful would your relationships register if you didn't have the story superimposed over what they felt, or didn't feel, like? What direction would you head if north, west, east, and south were as arbitrary a path as how you experience wind?

The warriors would excite you. The bold and beautiful would put you under a spell. The dedicated and reliable you'd put yourself near. The curious would show you where to look. The fearful you'd try to protect and comfort. It's as simple as the envy we hold for pets in their singular focus or expectations. I create a story along the direction I want to go. Whether it's as brilliant as a classic, or perfunctory as the CW, I'm going to attract or repel the cast best suited for the narrative. This fire-breathing dragon needs to keep incinerating the dead.

[794] Stapled Nuts

Let's start with the easy and “stupid” point of frustration: How do “jobs” work?

It doesn't matter where you go. Whether you are flipping burgers, or case-managing families, it usually takes 5 whole minutes before someone, somewhere, puts voice about how to do something differently. It isn't always clear that it's “better,” but dissatisfaction is always just beneath the surface. The burger place employee says they shouldn't be so understaffed, and it would help not contaminate food ping-ponging between doing the dishes, and assembling orders. Well, yes, you filthy idealist, but the company is concerned about the bottom line, and yours costs a lot.

Invariably, you'll have the person who's “been doing it” for many years. They actually have more than a few good insights on how to do what they do better. Some, I would say exceptionally few, companies have open-door easy communication up and down the chain. Moreover, when the idea is actually a good one, they may put it into practice in days or weeks instead of years, if at all. I've never worked at a company like this. The status quo, in my experience, is to not or never bother to offer some kind of improvement. No one there is trying to improve, they're trying to get paid and move on with their lives.

This posture I feel is part of a larger frustration at the base of lesser-worthwhile existences. If and when you can identify the better thing, and what's stopping you from its implementation goes beyond personal preference, pragmatism, or access, and you don't, I think that lived damming contradiction eats away at you. At least, for me it does.

Little things. We live in the future. We're accessible. Email should be responded to sooner than 10 days. I know you're not that busy, we have the same job. Just as you should respond to texts and abandon the memory of the word “fax.” Pretending people are reading and digesting ever-changing “policy.” Destroying your leadership and promoting people out of desperation instead of value and vision. I guess that's a big thing because I don't fret too often over the small stuff. You'll spend millions on software that functions worse than pen and paper.

It's not just that there's no real question about why I feel compelled to create my own thing, it's that this is the new categorically imperative thing. You have to do better than this. We have to talk to each other smarter than this. We have to react quicker. We have to be held more accountable to our downtime and the reality about what we can and can't pull off. It HAS TO exist. I don't care about the mean. I don't care about the happy stories here and there meant to prop up the artifice of value and morality. Every venture has it's peculiar problems and nature? No, you only develop specific kinds of problems when you allow things to be build around the wrong focus.

This is why, practically, you can never fix things. Large organizations exist as a confluence of forces well beyond your initiative and do-gooder spirit. They mean too many things and the rust can't be buffed away. The question for them becomes whether they are more living or dying. The “change change change” is rarely accounted for as good or bad unless it meets a target set relative to what many started to consider “too far.” We're down 34%! Okay? So, that's good? What if tweaking this instead of that, it would have been 70%? Should we be proud of running a quarter mile on broken feet, or decide to put away the gun we've been using to shoot them?

Thank me I've never quit. Thank me I found the land and had mind enough to save up for it. Thank me I've never stopped working at things I hate because I revel in the ideas and future that will account for them all. Thank me I can still recognize what I would never ignore if I had the means, method, and opportunity to fix and do better NOW. Increasingly, that “better” wants to get selfish and ignore the irony, no doubt a symptom of the system I'm entrenched in. The better idea is there, and captured, and struggling. When it gets its day, I hope to erase the stain of what existing like this has left on me.

[793] Oi Oi Oi

I'm going to try to account for why a few lines I've heard recently are stilling ringing around my head.

My builder and I sat down, and he discussed some of the things going on with his family. He had bought and improved a space that he said was one day meant for his granddaughter. “A kid should always have a place to come home to,” was his line.

The next one came from a TV show I can't recall (Russian Doll?) and amounted to the idea of attaching yourself to people because they're all we have.

Finally, an oddball character I met at Beerfest said, “You have celebrity energy.”

I think when you have reciprocity, many of the most endearing messages about what people are supposed to be to each other are allowed to come into focus. The routine taking advantage of people who look out for you is what has shaped my broad pull away from romanticizing “the provider” kind of narrative. The idea of having someone, anyone, to do things with is a compelling drive. Surely, what turned my talkative endearing drunk phone calling into “death would be a relief” blog narrative was ruminating on the futility and idiocy of drinking alone.

Where do I bring it back to? I've felt for a long time like I didn't really have a home. My apartments always an array of roommates with ever-worsening excuses to leave me hanging. My dad's house filled with stooge step-children and annoying hell-beast dachshunds. This couch sleeping saga has only normalized to the level of my deflated “everythingness” that's matched my particular story of over-worked and under-paid. 12 years after leaving “home” I'm poised to finally start establishing mild roots in something I'd flip in a heartbeat if the money were right.

Part of me is always in a detached floating place. I had a coworker tell me, “I can't read you,” seemingly defying every time someone's told me I wear everything I'm thinking on my face. I can't read me until I put words down. I'm in a constant pursuit of a mild self-assuredness. I'm in the business of mental condensing. I want loose ends tied or burned. I want to exist in the place that doesn't feast on some hidden room of self-loathing or unresolved question when the alcohol takes hold. I used to black out and shower everyone around me with praise. Now it's kind of a toss up with which dumb idea or conversation is going to grip me.

I'm going to take a sick day tomorrow. In drinking, I basically sacrificed two days in functioning and feeling okay, so Monday is going to be my do things that should have been done over the weekend day. I'm still finding it harder than I'd like to persuade myself that my job means anything or is going anywhere. You have to understand too, I couldn't do anything more or less. As is my custom, I've even emailed the head of the entire agency about where I could fit in to “do more.”

What would a celebrity do? What does it mean to have that kind of energy? Is it confidence? I mean, I didn't see anyone else catching raindrops on their tongue from cracks in the ceiling. Why am I still fascinated with the amount of people I can recognize and build entertainment relationships with in all of my show watching? Should I be like them? Disappear into role after role. Will all of my depravity unearthed in writing just testify to my celebrity persona one day? Built into the lore of something to be endlessly caricatured? What's celebrity mean in this modern environment anyway? Aren't there teenagers on YouTube who are treated as bigger than Beyonce? I guess, at least I don't know those teenagers' names.

What was the theme of this blog again? People? Attaching to them? Building roots where your offspring can always feel at home. The more I think about the idea of pairing up or kids the more I feel sick. I feel like I'd be doing it for my own entertainment or experiment. I don't know that I would pick large-enough portions of my life and relationships to suggest signing up someone new to it. I'd want to have the semi-insulated space to cultivate out the things that worked their way into me to no positive end. I want to give a touch of hopeful naivety more time to instantiate.

I think a lot about how I have changed in that way. Why do I shoot so high? Well, that came first. All of my damning sentiments and despotic takes only came after a very long series of shitty interactions with way too many people. That's hard to process. Where do you go when people don't want honesty? How do you respond to cowards? Where do you hide what people are trying to steal? What language do you build when you're talking to yourself because no one seems to understand you, and if they do, they never respond with anything but derision and judgement? Or, they act like silence isn't as much of a statement as anything.

It makes me rough. It makes me indelicate. It makes me insist, and grind my teeth, and look for excuses to emote after drinking. It keeps me looking for things I've already found but left me or got disorganized. I think it also makes people look for ways to tear you down. There's nothing like the secret dramatic irony of rooting for people to fail and win all at once depending on the degree of your own success or failure in life. Maybe there's my pocket celebrity claim. Some of you have perhaps been watching this humble blogger ride the crazy train for many years.

[792] Sick Son of a Bitch

I really, really, don't now how to write this blog. If it's any indication, it started on the second line, as though I hit enter before I began. What a mess, what a mess indeed.

I might just wait until tomorrow.

--------

Here we are, an hour or so later, and I'm incredibly annoyed.

 

First, I just feel sick. My head is flirting with explosion. My stomach is wrenching. I'm in a bad, bad way physically. If you read this like a nice little skip along, just remember, I've puked before, and am constantly considering puking again, while I try to capture my thought process.

 

I just texted an old friend. This old friend I'm fairly sure “hates” me under the presumption that I've raped one of her friends. This is the kind of place I'm occupying. I'm just fucking sick of things lingering. I'm tired of old prejudices and assumptions and really shitty justification defining the back rooms of my head or defining how I engage with the world.

 

She hasn't responded, of course.

 

I'm perpetually dizzy. The mild to intense pain in my temple serves to stir my stomach. I go in an out of feeling like I can deal with it with the world's most pretentious show paused in my peripheral. The Story of Film telling me how camera angles and story-tellers helped define eras. I can barely hold back the vomiting. The “revolutionary” wide-angle camera lens can eat my dick.

 

I'm in an impossibly conflicted space right now. I've met half this town through the course of my job, and none of them were at the Beer Fest. I occupied this space of upper-middle class people pretending to zero in on their beer tastes. I paid $55 for the privilege of getting there an hour early. I tossed the excess I felt was offered in over-pours.

 

I haven't really been in the mood to drink for years. What are you to do, by yourself, when you buy the ticket months in advance? I don't have friends, so it's not like I got to discuss the nuances. I didn't get to crack jokes or turn it into a shared memory. What was the point? Why is it midnight, me having slept half the day, me feeling like shit, typing this garbage trying to nail something fucking arbitrary to the ground?

 

I think the longer you live, the more you want to die. The baggage piles up. The floor of your relationships figures out a way to corrupt itself.The inability to recover reminds you bodily it's time to sleep very hard. It's a weird thing to say, but moments like this, I don't even want to die, but I do. I envy the endless rest. I wouldn't have to fight for my remotely noble space in the world. I won't have to piss and match. I could just die. I could just sleep and never wake up for work. Never take on the responsibility of all that with which I've tasked myself with creating. Never pretend as though my “impact” is much beyond the private ridiculous and personal eulogies whomever took to my page to let you know I'd died would experience.

 

Right now, things suck. They suck hard. They want to puke, again. They hate the idea of everyone they've ever met who isn't prepared to talk this instant about their shitty opinions about me. This moment is fucking dizzy and direct and just fucking angry. I can't close my eyes. I can't stare at the screen. Typing makes me want to puke up the pills I've swallowed. Just fuck it all.

[791] There Goes Gravity

Think I just wanna take a stroll.

It never ceases to amaze me. Now. I had a memory of turning incorrectly during a practice driving session as a teenager. Drifting into the next lane as I turned, thinking to myself, “I should probably just go with it, but we were taught to maintain our lane as we turn” and proceeding to “correct” myself before the teacher swerved me back to the “wrong” path. Even if there wasn't a car next to me, it was close enough that cutting back would have been dumb. Part of me registered it would be dumb. I'd been anchored in something I learned in class.

There's something of an infinite anchor list, no? Down to which of your genes bother to turn on and off. I wonder pretty consistently why I don't appear to be in abjectly terrible health with the amount of fast food I eat. I think my body figured out when I was younger, when it all began, that this was “food,” and figured it out. I'm not saying I'm in particularly good shape or anything, but I manage to not look at myself disgusted nor think I'm ever more than that 2 to 3 months of actual effort before I start showing off before and after pictures. My body is anchored to the shitty food I was raised on.

It might come as no surprise that anchored ideas I find the most interesting. The love stories. The cultural mythologies related to family. The specificity of different areas and time periods in what they're going to take pride in or be willing to die for. I think about how deep those anchors must go for us to be persistently flirting with totalitarian thinking. I think about the murdered relationships and never-weres because people never left the land of their first ideas. I think about how, if you're “now,” you've an infinite capacity to reside in the deepest joy and harshest pain of whatever idea it is you're observing at the moment.

I'm subscribed to a subreddit dedicated to asking women over 30 questions. Today there were stories about 4 or 17 year relationships, husbands dying, things fizzling out, and then people finding their current love and never being happier. There's desperate 30ish women looking for rays of sunshine in their lonely or heartbroken space that's just now beginning to realize the special connection with their boyfriend in high school wasn't the kind of healthy thing shared between functioning adults. Everyone's “now” exists one click away from the last. Your single digit years relationship went bust? HAD 4 OF THOSE SISTER! And the surviving guy is the best so far!

Reading that kind of stuff makes the problems that have been related to me about my relationships feel exceptionally petty. But then, I've been reading the opinions and offered wisdom of old people since I had internet access. The drama has always felt, fundamentally, boring. The work of tearing through your first love and constant reminding yourself of death just wishes people would get over themselves and have another drink. That's kind of the energy and perspective I'm always looking for, I just got there 30 or 40 years too early. I'm still in the bracket where people say without irony what lengths they'll go to have a kid if they aren't married and pregnant by 35.

I consider when I've said I don't really have a conception of “forgiveness.” My new best stab at what it, incorporating “now,” would look like keeping whatever the offense is in your mind while you do your best with the person in front of you. “You broke my heart....okay, can I buy you an ice cream cone?” “You murdered my son....okay, I still don't think advocating for the death penalty is the best at-large decision.” “You shattered something that will never be repaired....okay, here's what I have to say about it, and now I can take responsibility for myself and how I'll go forward.” Forgiveness as a function of a kind of resilience I could understand. Forgiveness as a measure of pragmatism is, practically, a cop-out.

I don't know how often I want to “be forgiven.” I want to be talked to. I want to be taken seriously. But when I think back to times in which people have offered “forgiveness,” it's come with that condescending or matter-of-fact string. “I forgive you, foolish animal, you don't know any better.” “I forgive you, for I am pious and perfect in my exercise.” “I forgive you, will that make you shut up now?” God forgiving your sins comes with the presumption of guilt. To the extent you want to keep blaming other people for what neither of you tries to understand, perhaps the forgiving instinct grows. Old, tired, people no longer willing to bother, forgive you your brash and ignorant youth. What a better time to let things go then as life beckons letting go of you?

I just feel weird. I'm still as present in some of my memories as I am writing this now. And given that memory is but a tool, I wonder if I'm still hammering away at the same project, or if there's a singular space we all inhabit. I wonder if that ability to inhabit it is choice or circumstance. I wonder if any, or every, message is being translated through it. I wonder if I clench my jaw because there's something wrong with me, or what I'm connected to. I wonder if our future or inevitable demise are determined in the infinitely indeterminate.

When I'm even more obscenely wealthy, I already know what I'm going to do. I'm going to invite everyone. I'm going to look for more lasting images and impressions of what “now” means, and I'm already coping with the letdown and the surprise smile or sentiment that tricks me into thinking it was all worth it. I'm gonna pause and look around, and briefly pretend to reminisce on every conversation and cost that went into making the picture look the way it does around me. I'm going to be as poking around in the dark and floating around lost “then” as I am “now.”

[790] Wish I Was A Baller

Dammit, I feel like I'm avoiding writing, so having basically just woke up, I'm forcing myself to.

Today, it's a mild temperature, mildly damp, and I am attempting to start a kickball group at work. I sent out the initial invitation on Thursday after an opening sign-up sheet and introduction email explaining our Midwestern pattern of “rain 2-3 days, spring 2-3 days, freeze 2-3 days” will result in quasi-short notice and potentially canceled attempts to trap a Saturday game in a good window of that cycle. I'm growing mildly obsessed with the “fallout” of this attempt. I'm having naive patriot who hadn't quite wrapped their head around what war means levels of PTSD.

This isn't the first time I've been the “event planner.” Inviting people to things and trying to be “extra” is a familiar space. I want to over-prepare. I want to buy bases in case the fields are occupied, I want to bring drinks, and Frisbees, or dodgeballs and baseball netting for an impromptu field and alternatives. I want to offer a dozen reasons for the decision to cancel or tough it out. I want to pretend like I wouldn't really only rather be out drinking or grabbing lunch with 2 or 3 of the people who signed up.

Starting things is hard. You have the initial “enthusiasm gap.” The same “We have to try your coffee sometime!” before walking right on by is the same, “Dodgeball sounds fun!” No one buys into ideas that aren't their own until they make them their own. The kind of twisted irony that would make me “like my job” is doing exactly not my job of my own volition, building a kind of coalition with people I would otherwise never engage with. I stayed at Showplace through horrible management times because they felt like familiar friends.

Now, it's even more complicated. These people are adults. They both extra don't give a shit one way or another, and they're DCS people. They're used to switching on and off in a moment's notice, persistent let-downs, and professional lack of sympathy or regard. This has to be an open door and be an easy option, or they'll be happy to dismiss something that feels like an impeding obligation just as quickly as the “budding adult syndrome” drained the old college crowd from giving a shit about waterslides and bowling.

So, wait a minute, maybe I've just stumbled into something positive by canceling on account of rain. I've led with, perhaps anchored, in accordance with the leading sentiment. This is kind of how it's going to be, probably too wet most of the time. By the time we ever get around to actually playing something, it'll have whittled down into the handful of people who've psychologically held up the prospect as worthwhile. I'll also get to demonstrate a level of “cool,” in projecting I don't give a shit one way or another, and not as though my entire existence and potential for friendship or companionship rides on the weather. (I'm hearing echoes of the panic and lament the impact from the weather has had on getting my house completed.)

I need to find ways to release the cobbled dust of my best laid plans into the wind more regularly. For reasons I've, for many years, been unable to simply “fix” or refrain from engaging in, I get deeply invested, at least bodily, to the point of the jaw clenching and stomach dropping and compulsion to run outside and crash test the grass and sand to really feel like circumstances beyond my control are the reason you have an hour or two of your Saturday back. To be sure, I'm probably going to make a drive-by of the park at some point today, silently praying it's too muddy.

Once you put all of the internal strife aside, how to address the kind of confusion and resentment for the people who sign up, but never respond to emails? In this scenario, you're literally across the aisle from them, and they won't tell if they're down to play. The hodgepodge of hardly-enthusiasm doesn't seem to bode well for the endeavor. I've seen as well people grow to resent “being included,” preferring you to have read their intentions in their lack of response or buy-in over time, grasping at the straw of their initial interest.

This is all really just reminding me why I've developed a kind of dickish tough skin. People compel me to walk into situations with a “no skin off my ass” attitude, hand in hand with the insistence, creative work-arounds, and over-explanations for how things could or should run. What's the alternative? Lazily accepting or dismissing whims of fancy? And to know that people broadly feed off your enthusiasm and organization while blithely projecting they could take it or leave it as just another thing! It's a mindfuck how to go about leading or starting something if you don't have the vision and coping skills. I don't want to look like I've given up too easily, aren't organized, didn't really mean kickball when I said kickball, or am not taking myself seriously. I also don't want to act like you don't care or have your own lives and concerns, so there's always a reason you're blowing off the email. Is kickball the arena where you're allowed to accept less from other people than you would from yourself?

Shit, there's another great hidden layer of conflict. How can you conduct yourself honestly, and not feel obligated to certain kinds of reactions and behaviors? If I “really” want people to play, shouldn't I find palliative ways to insist? If I “really” would rather cancel the whole idea and just invite a couple out to drink, shouldn't I send a frank and dismissive email citing lack of interest and naming those who've betrayed the whole endeavor? This is about not shitting where you eat though. This is extra credit once the homework is done. It can't be a necessary leg to continue what I'm doing. If I relegate it to after-thought status, I can cope with objectionable behavior. That's the coping secret and reminder more broadly. I'm an after-thought. It'd be more useful were I not forged of defiance.