[801] In Tent City

One of the first jobs I ever remember an adult telling me I should do was to be an architect. I like to build things. I dreamt of the day I'd be able to buy my own box of blocks we used to have in daycare, so I could spend all day creating new castles and not be compelled to destroy them when my mom came to pick me up. Me, her, and my brother putting together Legos are some of the few times I think we ever really got along.

I was just trying to build something now. I had an idea to put a tarp up on poles that I set in little buckets of cement. At first I conceived on them as being in full-size buckets with PVC. I started to consider how heavy a bucket full of cement would be, and thought about it breaking or the PVC not being able to stand up to the weather. I discovered metal rods that were cut to the same longest lengths that they sell PVC. I found smaller paint can-like buckets. I bought a couple bags of cement, and 2 PVC pipes just to run the experiment, and to create a taller middle pole.

You may have noticed, but it's never going to stop raining. When it accidentally stopped, I poured water/gas residue (as I only had a gas can to carry water in and forgot I had an unused one in the moving truck), and set the poles down in while pouring cement over the sides. I discovered less water made for a more “cementy” look and feel, and adjusted the recipe down the line of buckets. I set them against the house and they all hardened appropriately over the next few days.

I got home today, and thought on the way that I might grab the giant tarp, and finally see about setting it atop the poles. I sit and watch a little TV and dick around online instead. A couple hours later, I get the urge, and head outside. Me, not thinking things through, thought I should thread the grommets on the tarp with the string and create a kind of running line around the edges. I thought, I guess, that there would be a way to tighten the rope around the poles to secure each corner, and allow me to leisurely walk each one to where I wanted. It took about 30 variations on a “slip the fuck right off” theme before I got the bright idea to wrap the cord around the tarp itself and secure a little knot that fairly-enough reinforces itself as the pole gets tugged.

When I finally decide to apply that method to each corner, I begin to actually see the thing rise. What I've left out, is that it's been raining the majority of the time I'm attempting to do this. This means muddy and slippery escapades hanging off the back of the moving truck, where the tarp is also setting, and slapping myself with the wet and muddy paracord I'm undoing and redoing. I got a brief sense of what it will be like to be able to open my door, and not have rain pouring in. I dug holes, deep enough ones the 10th time around, for the buckets to be dropped into, and now it'll be a matter of inching and reinforcing and resetting where I want the corners.

I discovered I could tuck two of the poles under the mother's attic portion of the truck. I found my newly extra-secured camera is in exactly the wrong place and the kind of internal curse of good intentions from my builder struck again. I saw a small frog living in my bathroom roof. I realized I'll probably need a few more poles, and will have to spend a concerted amount of time securing a tennis ball to the PVC so it doesn't rip the tarp. I've got all kinds of scratches and bug bites. I can see the tarp drearily hung over the truck as two other poles couldn't take the amount of water coming down. But it's a start, and I learned a few things, and I got dirty. I was playing, and building, and not clenching my jaw as I suffered a hundred different defeats.

I think the spirit in the kind of fun I have in building things is lost on people. I was chastised for not wanting to approach some of the land projects “properly,” and not “simply” renting a machine to do some trenching, or not sitting down and putting together a whole plan to ensure we'd be done exactly on the hour necessary. Do I think you should be particularly ill-prepared and wanton in your approach to landscaping or otherwise projects you're not familiar with? Of course not, and I see the reasonableness of estimates and parts lists and working theory of how you're going to approach. But also, for most things in my life, that hasn't been my experience as working...basically ever.

I've sat and put together business plans, and then I ran a business. Nothing matched, and my main take away was a handful of new excel calculation tricks I've since forgotten. My day job would love for me to have “100% timely initiations,” and guess what? Everyone I haven't seen in 2 weeks wants to meet between the same 3 hours at the end of the day Friday, or to push what needs done until after the, of course, holiday weekend so it's extra late. This house is, literally, less than a week's worth of effort with 2 people and fair weather conditions, and it's taken me two years to bring you this message, and I still can't use my water.

You have to do. You have to find the value, joy, lessons, and pain while you're doing. You have to get rained on, and find the resolve to try again tomorrow. You have to be told, a hundred or thousand times, “we'll get to it tomorrow,” and figure out what you can get done in the meantime, because tomorrow never comes. Am I itchy and trying not to think about how I'm not going to get to shower until the morning? Sure, but I've slid another small piece of the puzzle together as to what I want the land to look like. I want to be able to work in the never-ending rain. I want to know how deep to dig, how much cement and water to mix, how to tie better and smarter knots, and to know every moment that went into making even visually unimpressive things functional triumphs.

That's what I'm inviting people out to the land for. It's not to necessarily “help” me in random or seemingly arbitrary ways I may go about things. It's to find people to play with. It's to see what you might create with a little too much time, money, space, or someone to help you hold something up while the rest falls down.The point is to have fun with it, to experiment, and to be so engaged that you don't think about how wet you are or the bugs. Most of my experience is otherwise dominated by varying swarms of bugs.

I'm reminded that I'm a kid. I'm a 30-year-old child who would rather play in the mud than necessarily pick up a paycheck. You need balance, and I like to eat, but even getting consistent positive feedback at work, and knowing I bring a calm head and respectful influence into a field wrought with hammy emotions and power trips, I need to work for me. I learned my general cool disposition for me ( I was even told by the quintessential “cool black guys” hanging outside of Millennium Station, “Now there goes a cool dude, I'd like to hang out with him, smoke some weed”) in case you thought it wasn't official. I own the fun I had at the parties everyone grew to resent. I retain the positive memories with every long-lost friendship or fuck buddy. I know where I need to be in order to offer without expectation. I still don't know what people expect from themselves, but it hasn't been to try and enjoy what I've put on the table.

I hope you're having fun, because without this giant perpetual mess to fix, rearrange, and point to as something that exists outside of my head, I rarely am. If you find company in the general misery I think my writing suggests, consider that creativity, productivity, and muddy also enjoy company.

[800] Different Peaces

There is a vast and deep difference between “selfish” and “personal responsibility.”

 

I think we're a severely scarred country. The open questions that plague me center around what I see as self-centered and destructive decision making by and towards people who would otherwise be your allies. It's a very familiar story, and I've yet to wrap my head around the degree in which I see it happening, nor have I attempted to offer a comprehensive story about the different levels I see it happening.

 

There's the classic, my family cannibalizing itself. Grandparents die, kids fight over what's left, eventually you start planning holidays around who can and can't be in a room with each other. I see it in the “everyone run for president” game with the Democrats pretending they aren't mostly aligned and have much of anything new or individuated to bring to the table. I've seen it play out a dozen times in my “friendships,” that have proven to be, if nothing else, a lesson that alone in the field trying to figure things out myself at least allows me the room to breathe without getting blamed for taking up all of the oxygen. I think it's familiar enough with married couples who get passive aggressive and bring up things from years past to levy when they feel insecure or backed into a corner.

 

My dad and I were talking, and he recalled knowing what it felt like to be a part of the neighborhood. The neighbors looked out for each other. They all knew each other's names. They stood up for the kid getting fucked with at the end of the block. Today, my dad, one of the most giving and nicest people on the planet, recalls that he's had neighbors who hate him, for presumably, being him. He keeps his house in order, and will wave to you when he gets home. But, to them, fuck that guy.

 

What is this? Or, why haven't I found a book with the language to help me understand it? If we look to the past, will we find a contagion that infected our parent's generation? Is it easy enough to blame on technology and the internet? How are 25 year relationships broken in a flash? How are some relationships worth therapy and conversation, and others accusations and isolation? Why does no one believe that the guy or girl next to them, with the same ethics, worries, and desires is qualified enough to run things and make a decision in your best interest? Was it a little corruption having an undue effect? Was something lingering in our cultural system waiting for our immune system to take a hit before it could be unleashed?

 

I think about this as I'm standing in the rain for 2 hours waiting outside of a concert venue trying to see one of my favorite bands. I was in front of a group of fuck-you drunk Milwaukee assholes. One had a cross tattooed on his arm. One walked up and down the line several times soliciting high fives. When the couple in front of him didn't want to, he said, “All I want is a high five, all you have to do is touch my hand, and I'll leave you alone.” This persisted for a half hour. I figured he was both a likely rapist and Trump voter. One of them screamed at me, “We're as miserable as you!” as I spoke up and said their chant, “Let us in! Let us in! Let us in!” wasn't working. He was incorrect.

 

Getting drunk is a selfish act in which you can take personal responsibility by not excusing your behavior while drinking, but perhaps using it as a window to reflect on why you did something. You can choose better the next time, if there is a next time. You can discover things that need to be worked on, or conversations that need to be had. But all of that work is as much a personally responsible choice as it is to drink in the first place. One of those is considerably easier to do than the other.

 

I know that I have the capacity to suck up all of the oxygen in the room. I think I'm on a lot of people's minds very well independent of if they actually want me to be there. I think I speak to the personal responsible impulse that I don't see happen in life as often as it needs to. I think when I speak of demise, it's not that I just cherry pick the worse news and hope it self-serves. I think I describe in detail the thought, or lack thereof, that leads to catastrophe, and I attempt to root it in the most persistent observations. You won't talk to me. You won't respond to facebook messages sometimes. You can't be wrong, because your lives are carrying on in the sensitive and selfish place that you and you alone can deem worthy. It comes with all of the judgment and “maturity” about what brings you joy and what you need to just get through the day. It's a hill you're willing to die on.

 

I genuinely don't like how many of my ties have been broken. I don't like that I'm plugged into an environment that I don't believe it's possible to really plug into. But I will break every single one of the fake ones I can while I continue to search for people who actually believe relationships are worth protecting, cultivating, and relating to honestly. I'll keep handing out chances because I don't believe in you, and it's not my desire to create the same kind of black hole of resentment. That doesn't mean I won't continue to have my harsh words. That doesn't mean I forgive the bullshit. But it does mean I'm going to try, in spite of you, and keep attempting to define out why and when I'm wrong, so I don't end up like you. As predicted, unbearably slowly, my dreams and perspective are leading me to precisely where I predict and desire. Given that I see less and less social media celebration, I suspect life is starting to sink in a little harder for the vast majority.

 

For all of the things I believe are genuinely out of control, you can trust that my engagement and challenge and struggles are not on that list. I picked construction area tiny house. I pick statements speaking to the severe lack of care or candor I've started to feel about our dynamic. I pick to lavish rewards and completely withdraw. I don't do it lightly, and I don't do it for fun. But if you're unwilling to be a part of the process and conversation, I'm turning it into a story I can stomach telling. Anymore, it's not that I won't play your games, I'll just show you how bad they can make you feel as you're attempting to do to me. Because I'm no better or worse than you, but for my capacity to call out my own self-destructive impulses, and work to combat them. 

 

I don't even have a crowd, or collective, or friend that I can rely on for more than scraps when it's convenient for them in my immediate day to day. Not really. Because the story for them is about what I've taken or they've sacrificed in service to being in my presence. I don't need to be mildly appeased here and there to be kept as an insurance policy to hopefully be exploited later. I don't want to be in perpetual negotiations about things that were never a problem until insecurities provoked them to be brought up. I don't believe the world is acting in good faith. I don't think my “friendships” survived the hijacking of our minds. I want my power and momentum in life to come from me, and every drop of sweat I put into tearing out my conception of the world and making it real, not the negotiated M.A.D. nonsense of everyone trying to row their own boat across the ocean.

 

And maybe I never get there. Maybe I slowly turn into a country bumpkin with a little too much time and money on his hands, who dies in a freak accident with too many expensive toys on his half-cultivated land. At least I'll have come by it honestly. At least my picture captured at any point in time will be of a clear conscience for leaving nothing unsaid. I think our demise is locked in, and if I could do something to accelerate it, I would. I wish it didn't have to be that way, but what it really means to feel the consequences won't kick in until the last moment. You're not the kind to get out ahead of things. You're just human. You just want to do you. Who am I to judge? Because it's always about me, right?

[799] Survival of the Fittest

I feel like I don't matter to anyone.

There we go, first blog from the land, and that's the line that caught me earlier today as I was sitting in Planet Fitness, waiting for a coworker who was never going to show up.

I'm so far down this “my own home” line. It never ends. That's honestly never something I really anticipated. I expected to find myself picking and choosing little vanity projects and “for the sake of killing grass and bugs” things. I thought I'd find myself motivated to push that boulder just a little bit more up the hill when I got home each day. I thought I'd nailed a cement sign named “patience” into my skull that would keep me even, as I navigate the fallout of my house being not-so.

I have to be detailed, at least for a paragraph or few. What happens is that you budget for $300 in supplies, and maybe 2 days of labor at $125 a day. The project might be able to start this weekend, and be done by Monday. It doesn't get started this weekend, a truck is broken. In earnest, you offer to drive, pick up the supplies, and help in the afternoons. You offered to help over the weekend, but they won't need you, they'll be able to knock it out. Keep in mind, these are the good, reliable, honest guys. Life is just happening to them in ways particular to them, as it is to us all. Each day that goes by is attributed to the broken truck. But wait, there's more.

Your reliable builder is having a hell of a time. He's getting divorced. He's being denied access to see his non-biological granddaughter. He's got brain lesions that cause him to get wildly nauseous. His guys disappear on him, and the people he's looked after in life throw things in his face and threaten to play out scenes from Western shoot-outs. He's visibly constantly dealing with the stress of what's going on around him, and he wishes to return to his former glory of doing things quick and “perfect.” This means when I get home, late, because country traffic is as real as city traffic, I see him spending time shaving edges and reattaching drywall that was attached yesterday, because some cosmetic imperfection was getting to him. Have I said dozens of times it's about function over aesthetics? Yes. I'm watching the labor tally rise as more days get added.

I've got yellow spray foam hung like tacky Christmas lights all over the place, soaked foundation and open water and mud pits around grass that needs whacked. I can deal with the mess, it's an active construction site. But there's no way to predict the future, apparently, until half a job has been done. Need 5 2x4s? Okay. Actually, it's 10, or 12, or 15. And let's get them from the most expensive place, because it's a little closer. Oh, actually, the truck is down, so you could have gone to Lowe's, picked up what we needed, brought them at your leisure, saved money, and tuns out that could have been calculated 2 weeks ago when I first looked at where x-thing lined up with y-thing. You bought caulk? I bought caulk, and forgot this stockpile I've been creating, so guess we have double! I just picked up the order that was put in, but also, I could have picked it up cheaper, and in bulk, and everything extra has been sitting in the exact same place for months.

I'm here now, on my computer, downloading well in excess of what any major internet provider would allow me to. My main structure is so tightly sealed, I've changed the temperature 3 times and felt the impact before I could get through each paragraph. I have, at least snack food, in and around my mini fridge. The toilet can flush, albeit with iron-rich water. I have about the space it takes to sit in front of my computer and half of my bed that I can truly occupy, but there is a slice of heaven here.

Everyone's got a story. That's the horrid cliché I threw out to the coworker who never came. She made it 5 days. But her “real” motivation, to be a bird floating about the wind never knowing where life will really take it, she wouldn't share with me until the severity of the disappointment and hollowness started to sink in. She's one of the few I like at work. We started going because she was wearing plastic wrap under her clothes talking about how it was supposed to help her sweat and lose pounds. She's gregarious and take charge, but when pushed, steps sideways. I thought I had a chance to start a good habit, and good basis for ongoing conversation and friendship. I got another person to tell me my influence doesn't matter, and I need to keep my distance.

When I talk about not having real problems, I mean it. I don't even know what to call how little I feel about the endless void that is attempting to “solve” things. I revel in my absence. I need water. I'll need to eventually sweep out and mop up the drywall dust, sawdust, dirt, kill the bugs let in from the garage door being open, because, “it's nice weather!” In that way, the space still doesn't really feel like mine. The country music and touch of cigarette smoke. I'm still not alone alone. I'm still not learned enough in the ways of building things myself. If it were up to me, I don't know that I'd go back outside. My pool is going to be indoors, and if sun makes it in through the roof, bravo.

“Life isn't meant to be lived alone.” This, some line from some show I can't remember. I don't know that I want to live “alone,” as much as I can't take the heartbreak of trying, and not being able to find people anything like me. The ones who resemble me, capitulate. The one's who like me, overwhelmingly, find the reason I become “too much,” whether they want to bolster that opinion with a rape allegation, or stick to more traditional ghosting behaviors. You see stupid fucking memes, I may start only calling memes by the proper title “stupid fucking memes,” that speak to being judged whether you try or not, whether you speak or not, so do it anyway. Victims puke aphorisms one speculates are meant to inspire. Let me tell you, you're full of shit. You don't want me loud and proud. You won't engage with meek and contemplative. Ra ra rally around your bullshit, but it's no secret why I'm so eager to shove your little parade off the list of “people” I care to paint my brain with.

What's left to do but watch? My TV habit feels less like an occupying of time or analogy, and more like an imperative. When your plans come to fruition, maybe, and well-independent of your goddamn opinion, why continue to make them, or believe in your capacity? When your relationships aren't merely superficial, but perpetually excessively and painfully so, how do you approach them with anything but a kind of reserve and cynicism? It doesn't mean you don't like people. But they're people. The gym is there when they won't be, so can you fall for it? If everything I own gets destroyed, the shows are out there. There's a billion guitars I could play. Hell, my supervisor referred to her house burning down as, “Well, there's our spring cleaning,” and hers is a strong point to be made.

It seems like the list of things I don't care about grows longer all the time. I don't care that the coworker blew me off. I care that she, a dozen times, lied about her enthusiasm or willingness to do it. I care that the story of my life is more often meeting people who don't want to get through to the other side unless it's on their horribly, if-at-all, communicated terms. Their picture of our mini-adventure has to stay in tact, because, god forbid they catch something I write, and the illusion of their self-deceit be laid bare, as they have to acknowledge there's another person over there.

I'm home. The quiet hum of my computer. The even quieter flow of air. I can see the bugs flitting about in my security cameras. Everything I need to pack up for the day is in one spot. I was tired, and maybe just a touch short with my builder, swatting away bugs and finding the first tick of the season on my jeans. I want something to feel complete. I want to speak to something growing that matters and is worth building upon. I happened to watch the first half of Wild Wild Country about the cult in Oregon in the 80s, so many people on the same page about starting a “new” society where people would be taken care of. Naive to the corrupt soul that is man. Naive to the other minds in the surrounding towns with their own ideas as to how to respond. Am I in a cult of the remnants of my personality? A cult of one, pursuing “truth,” so discussed in the pages and pages amen?

The happiest point in my day was hearing my darling friend only got house arrest instead of 2 weeks imprisonment for her 2nd DUI. In some bizarre coincidence, she's the 3rd or so friend of mine to be a girl, with a, let's say nuanced relationship to alcohol, who won't be driving for a while. The people in my circles have their own foibles. I'm always curious why there's stories like that abound. I get it, cultural and social decay and whatnot, but, back to me, if I mattered, if my ideas were compelling. If I had a thing or two worked out about budgeting, or sacrifice, or honesty about the nature of the investment and commitment to changing things, not for the sake of it, but with meaningful intention, maybe I wouldn't be out here, alone, tip-toeing around my proclivity to dismiss feelings, and begging my hollow frustration not to say the wrong thing about the progress made so far.

I don't know fighters. We're still in the #metoo era, right? Survivors is where it's at. I know people who “survive” the harsh environments they leisurely travel to. I know people who cling to their job after the initial plan might've caught snags. I know people happy to play along and play adult. They won't make any more or less waves than they have to row over or hold their breath until they pass through. I doubt that's how they see it. They have a cause, or a vision, or a worse-off that they can advocate for and donate to. Heroes, no doubt. Nothing says stirring up things in service to the good more than facebook donations. Maybe make it $20, or $50! I'm getting older, and they let me have a “real job” for 2 years so far!

Ugh, I just want to complain and shit on everything, but the hole is still there. I'm not that invested. I'm indefinitely indefinite. When I get what I want, I'll still be hungry. When I find a friend, they'll be house-arrested, or dancing in every way but aerobically.

I'm home. I'm alone. I have my shows. I have my dusty-stuff waiting to be wiped down and given orders. I have the scent of no-frills plywood, and musky blankets, who speculate about when they'll get to see the washer and dryer in circulation. I don't think the world has anything on this royal baby. Inching along, always whining.

I put Byron's gun to my head the other day. I had no intention of firing it. It was arbitrary, and 1 beat Taxi Driver because his mirror was near by. I have plenty of desires and things I look forward to. I like myself. But I do, legitimately, persistently think about death, where the idea is just this dumb little plaything that prompts me to do dumb shit like that. Do I want to be a person who would never do something like that? I'd rather be the person who knows he's not going to pull the trigger. I wish I could have as good a handle on anything or anyone else.

[798] T.B.L.

Here's one where the title came first.

I want to describe what I'm deeming “The Big Lie.”

The Big Lie is a shifty beast. Its defining character trait is an ability to become literally anything. It's practically a fundamental force of the universe. Colloquially, you might understand it as a grand illusion tantamount to “we're all gonna live forever!” Its quality allows us to persist indefinitely in (a) direction, independent of external qualifiers attempting to describe the nature or moral of that path. The Big Lie is a tool, perhaps a necessary one, that acts as a defiant buttress against the onslaught of indomitable Truth.

The Big Lie is polite, because, what if? What if you slam the door on an opportunity? What if they got the wrong message? What if you betray your motives and disclose something you never intended? It's okay, sweetheart, everything will be okay. You're a fighter. You'll figure it out. Don't let your story end here! We believe in you.

The Big Lie is romantic. Its love will last forever. Its butterflies can fly straight through the sun. It's anticipating the ending of a movie you've seen 1000 times, with a refreshing tear and sigh for what's nowhere else reflected. It will wine and dine, carpe that diem, and burst out in song at the chance to be here and now and with you, where nothing outside matters, and we're in this together.

The Big Lie is pragmatic. You gotta pay the bills. The kids can't be left in such a state. I wouldn't dream...

The Big Lie has so many plans. 3 months from now, abs. When this debt is paid, relief! My grandmother didn't find my grandpa until she was 36! With this election, we'll right this ship.

The Big Lie is pretentious. How dare you phrase it that way? Don't you understand how much I've given and how deeply I care? If only you had my perspective, things would really start to get better. There is no “I” in “team,” but let's not forget who brought us all together now.

In order for something to constitute The Big Lie, it has to lie at the heart of all of your insecurities. It's a long and loud bellowing you pretend is a whisper. It's the nagging that makes you cry for “no reason” when you've been pushed against a wall or otherwise triggered from stress. It's the argument you're not willing to have because you're not willing to think about the consequences of doing so. It reinforces itself as it gains momentum across lax disciplines.

I tend to feel like I sound dramatic with many things I say. I, really, don't want to live a lie. I want whatever form my Big Lie takes to blindside me and burn the lesson into my skull. I live by the contradictory or contending thought. I breath the counter-example. I turn every best thing about me into a story of my failure to utilize them properly, and I shape every shitty misstep as a piece of the broader contextual whole.

I think the constant dance of not adopting The Big Lie is literally the voiced, written, and acted out consequences of the world. The responsibility is yours, to suffer or accept. I watch meth kill people and destroy families. Don't you know it “makes them feel better” and “isn't that big a deal?” I watch as we STILL do not comprehend that extinction-level suicidal forces are weaving their way past our collective psychological mechanisms that pull up. We're battered wives, isolated, without agency.

I think every drop of poisonous deception you allow, covers the surface and penetrates deep. A battle for hearts and minds so drowned in contemptuous seas is not a battle worth fighting. To even look for land, let alone a moral high ground, as the security The Big Lie provided proves an inadequate buoy induces panic. Feverishly afraid, we reach for heaven before going under.

We were asked today to go around the room, say who we were, and why we loved what we do at our job. I was the only one who led with, “I don't love what I do.” Was everyone around me lying? Only they'll know, but I suspect from some of their answers, it was easier to play along. This kind of thing happens dozens of times a day. How much do you like that blouse? Do you think you can do what's best for this family? Are you really that friendly and invested? The one note, played until you're dizzy with glee. If I never see you sad or angry, is that why you think I'm “negative,” and can't see or understand what makes me happy?

We're trapped into some form of illusory experience. Our brain takes shortcuts. We reinforce biases and fill in blanks meant to be blanks. This isn't The Big Lie, this is just the consequences of biology. Biology set conditions, we laid The Big Lie on top. Biology gave us many many pitfalls, and we celebrated them. The world bred us through death and sacrifice, and we called it GAIA, put Gods in the clouds, and worshiped the sun thinking it all eternal. And in our fear masked in deference, and praise scarred by resentment and scorn, we practice the rituals with withered shreds of dried hearts, for nothing beats. Music played for our ears only.

I'm going to continue to testify. I'm going to show what it means to be primed and prepared for everything to change in an instant. I'm not someone who should ever be believed in, just watched. I even hate that song, and now it's mine. The truth happens, and The Big Lie allows it to.

[797] Don't Mind If I Do

I'm hung up on the idea that I would ever consider myself, or call myself, “crazy.”

 

For me, “crazy” feels like a temptation. The better things are going on around me, I feel genuinely compelled to, mostly say, something ridiculous. For reasons I'd like to believe have to do with an appreciation for easily seen consequences, I don't. I flirt with saying crazy things, and to be sure, I try to push it when it comes to getting a laugh, but this annoying curiosity is a persistent devil in my ear.

I suppose I think about “crazy” because of how often it's used nonchalantly to describe aberrant human behavior. You'd have to be crazy to threaten to burn down your mother's house and hijack your kid to California, right? It's crazy to think about the confluence of forces that elect ignorant fascists. It was the craziest thing, he just swerved and I was almost run off the road!

 

Crazy suggests, at minimum, doing something unexpected and often destructive. Banal crazy is a bizarre song or off-putting set of noises and gestures that you can't make sense of. Crazy people “lose their mind,” suggesting it's a random assortment of behavior that could only result from dropping the responsibility to be coherent. That's what I find irrational compulsions to be. The gut “instinct” to burn something down, or be inappropriate, has nothing to do with talking through the feeling, or attempting to figure out if it can be eradicated.

 

There's a weird discussion about personal sovereignty and intention I could try to get into to muddy the waters, but I think it's enough to say, I like options, and I don't want to be too predictable. I like the idea of being the 1 in a million to do something, or prepared to do something, at any moment. That spark or creative energy runs both ways. While you can do something fun or goofy, like run into the direction sign while all the “normal” mall-walkers dutifully avoid, you can also scream bomb on an airplane, or opt for racial epithets in lieu of perfectly good four letter words, because “they're just words, man.”

 

Here seems to be where you distinguish between antagonism or provocation, and solicitation. The idea that you shouldn't be a dick seems rooted in the obvious idea that you don't like to be provoked. Solicitation street-walks a finer line, because maybe, just maybe, you're in the market for what someone is selling. People often want to laugh, and will forgive the bad taste if you acknowledge your pitch was sincere. People will denounce and avoid someone who gets off on the idea of everyone around them being angry.

 

I don't like the impulse. I think it's one of those unintended consequences of the strive to individuate your personality. Options, even bad ones, are just that. But even still, logically, behaving within a set of appropriate conversational and behavioral contexts will beget more options, so those can't be the pull alone. I'm pressed to ask, what is the impulse to destroy?

 

I think about this when it comes to eating like shit, being a little too loose with finances, and even picking at my skin. What prevents me from just “doing the right thing” all the time. That song still haunts me. Why would you ever seek to tarnish a legacy or identity?

 

I can speculate. One, you fundamentally don't believe in what truly constitutes a legacy or identity. Somewhere, not-that-deep down, I'm as fatalistic and “already dead” as they come. My infamy could get quoted in every book unto the ultimate heat death of the universe. And I won't even have to wait that long to stop caring. No matter how well things are going in my life, I'm pretty much always thinking about death. In that context, very little seems to matter.

 

More speculation, I'm afraid something may work. I'm deeply distrustful and very exhaustively tired of getting fucked by dumb foreseeable things. People who want to be my friend? People who want to show up? People I can talk to about anything indefinitely? I've fallen for everything before. I know I came out the other side touting my own openness and capacity to be a whipping boy, but why can't I protect myself and crack the whip first? I think of a video we watched in one of my job “trainings” of a kid who has experienced trauma and continues to do weird angry shit at her foster home. The parents don't understand her triggers, and the kid doesn't know how to cope. They all hug and still love her at the end! The message being the suggestion of unconditional love and the moral fortitude it takes to be a foster parent. They leave out how often kids like that rarely, if ever, get placed, and that trauma generally follows them the rest of their lives. This traumatized kid has resolved to go it mostly alone, write it out, and reduce things to dollar amounts.

 

Even further speculation, I resent the amount of responsibility I've taken on. Every new badge is one I watch people I'm endlessly frustrated with ignore. Why is it the responsibility of the few to carry so much weight? Is it literally the simplest explanation with math and Bell curves? Smart people have to carry the water because 60 million are ready and willing to Trump the place to hell? Motivated flirting-with-personality-disordered weirdos have to pass along the encouraging words and live to the fullest so the onlookers stay alive with half-hearted smiles and basic bitch dreams of their own? Where do I get off ever wanting “the world?” And why do I discover you're all exceedingly happy to let me try and take it?

 

Now, “crazy” for me looks like a test of my lashing out for sovereignty. That's right, it looks like we couldn't avoid going there. What's more different than what destruction looks like at the point all signs trend a single direction? Healthy relationships? Good habits? Money in the bank? Respect from your peers? Stuff galore? Looks good? Girl on your arm? It's tempting fate, so if you can bring it down first, you don't have to be surprised by the heart attack or car crash. You can inject death in a manageable way. Typing that sentence made me feel different.

 

While I respect and accept death, I don't really think I'm looking for it in any greater measure than it already occupies my thoughts. Occasionally, I even refrain from killing a bug and opt to let it back outside. I suppose it is noteworthy that at some level, I would like to be able to control what I see as inevitable destruction. Do you know how many times I've thought about my house burning down? Me creating an inventory is half OCD-adjacent fun, half hoping to make it easier to get my things back when they're gone.

 

How would this manifest in relationships? I actually do think open-ish relationships are natural and healthier, but would I press my luck with my ex knowing somewhere she wasn't really about it? I mean, that's arguably the relationship where my propensity to “get it over with” reached its most absurd and dangerous point. Housekeeping my facebook contacts is me not wanting to navigate the nonsense conversations pretending we still have anything in common besides drinking months or years from now.

 

It's such a cliché to be self-destructive like that, and I don't think I've gotten to the point of abject pathology for precisely that reason. Watching the idiots beg for punishment in my day job doesn't endear me to that behavior. I suppose in my language, I recognize them as wanting to die, they're just going about it in sloppier ways. Show up with a drug screen and 3 month backlogged therapy appointment to that environment...

 

Perhaps more innocently, I'm just bored with my own thoughts, and remain perpetually curious as to how they bounce off the things and people I like. If I like you, it's either because I exacerbate some level of pathological thinking in you, and make it fun, or maybe you're desperate to talk to someone who can't be triggered and needs to rush past the creative muck in order to get to a mutually understood exchange. You never find that place talking nice. You never share “the worst,” because, well, duh.

 

I'd still rather lose the thought to destroy and maintain the creative energy. I don't know that it can happen, but that I even wish for that makes me think I'm a centimeter better person than I considered myself before I thought to call myself “crazy.” I don't know that I really wish how my brain operates on anyone, so if you managed to get to the same places as mine all on your own, the possibilities between us are endless.