[805] Aint Never Scured

Oh man, crazy shit's happening.

I've discussed before how I don't fear things in the normal way. My general being belayed by a mild panic at all times forces me to perpetually evaluate all feelings as an estimate of likely unreasonable compulsion to act out or force an issue. That is, I need to create a mess worthy of provoking my fear impulse. I need to read into something so irrationally far that, at least subconsciously, I'm treating it as a high stakes game or life and death narrative about my open wide, or suddenly collapsing, future.
Kinda on a whim, I walk into my boss's office and give my elevator pitch for getting more overtime. I had no speech prepared, just a nuts and bolts, “I get bored, I want to do shit, let me present to you ideas to pre-approve for more money because I refuse to work for free again.” She said all I have to do is the first step, present something for her to approve, and she's otherwise good with me poking my head into the things I've found time to bitch about.

As with all things, you need to do a cost/benefit analysis and ensure that whatever you're complaining about isn't going to kick up more dust than is worth settling. You need input from potentially aggrieved parties, and you need to bring some tangible proof of concept that operates easier thanwhat's already on offer. These are straight-forward asks and expectations with usually much bigger baggage than they look superficially. But, as with all things, it's the same call and response, ask and ask again methodology until you get to the bottom.

For mine and your not-so entertainment, I want to run through a few things I plan to package:

The first is smarter input forms. We spend ungodly amounts of time typing the same things over and over. We pull information from 6 different pages, not because it's complicated information, but simply because it's grouped stupidly. (Why should I have to open 4 pages just to compile kids ages, for example? Or, Why do the dates I have to get things done by not auto-populate so it's not last minute scrambles to get another picture before 30 days?) There's really small tweaks and page layout things that could be programmed, quickly, with basic bitch knowledge from someone in IT, that would save, no kidding, hours of effort, just because it wasn't spread out so dumb.

The second is an outreach program. No one knows what we do. We only show up when people think they're in trouble, or we're trying to build a case against them. We don't follow up. We're not at the street fair. We're not reaching out to the agencies we work with to give them insight on why we're not going to immediately go out and interview a potential rape victim after the police have already talked to her and DCS is scheduled to come tomorrow. Needless bad blood is created because no one's relaying reasoning and restrictions. Opening your mouth is free.

The third is in how we pitch and relay information to new hires. There's no reason anything written down on a form couldn't be in a singular book and walked through from start to finish in different ways from the beginning. Nothing I’ve had to learn the hard way couldn’t be a page or two. You have people training who aren't in the field, and while procedures differ between offices, and that's going to be necessary to a degree, there's no reason a standard can't exist that's more accessible and tangible than the stringing together of “policy” that we all pretend to follow to the letter.

Fourth is FCM access to supervised visit plans. We pay out the asshole to hire outside agencies to do things. I would LOVE to take my visit supervisor time and roll it over into doing so with actual power. If I combined my hours doing visits with the basic tasks of the job already, I'd start finding those pushing 2K paychecks again, AND be saving the state something like 70% on their budget for such things. With the added benefit of actually being able to cancel visits for high parents without losing money, and be of consequence and first-hand experience with someone I work with in the office. No lingering 3rd party incentives to behave badly.

Fifth, a literal truth and reconciliation counsel/process. I've sat through about 5 or 6 hours of talking around race issues that devolve into obscure bitching about the job broadly and reduce to “it's big, it's complicated, let me get back to you with nothing a month from now.” Beef can be quashed with a dose of truth and real talk. You should be able to hash out differences in the office if we're literally asking our families every day to support each other through years of trauma or incidences of neglect and abuse. If we can't do it at home, no wonder families think we “do nothing” for them in the field.

Sixth, I want to negotiate after-hours services. I can't tell you the amount of times we pit someone's job against their ability to go to a sobriety meeting or some other obligation. You shouldn't have to choose, and if we're going to pretend to help you, we have to admit to ourselves that we can't be in two places at once, and neither can our clients. Maybe we take some of the money we save on visitation and throw it over to Centerstone to stay open until 9 or 10 with 2 people on staff as dedicated drug screeners. Maybe we partner with churches who hold AA or NA meetings at more accessible hours. Maybe this mechanism already kinda works somehow, and nobody knows about it, and we keep setting our clients up for failure because we can't talk across the aisle.

Seventh, I want to know where the budding therapists are, when we can hire them, what incentives they'll need, and what technology is doing to make conversations happen easier. We have a MASSIVE shortage of people qualified to walk other people through trauma. Be it in person or teleconferencing, I want people to get out of their bubbles and be able to access the help they need. Why don't we have a booth where clients can come in and talk to someone? Why don't we know for sure we'll have a dozen more therapists at least buying into some kind of program we create, even if they might not be present in person?

Any one of these can become a very large month-long task with a hundred phone calls and endless sea of questions. Every one of them can be distilled down into whether or not something operates the way it's intended. Do the forms work and save time? Yes? How'd we get there? That's my job and nightmare to reflect on indefinitely. Are we getting more therapists? No? Why not? Not enough pay, technology too confusing, or distrust of skills gap with all of this accelerated nonsense? Maybe not a problem we can solve, good luck, crazy families. Maybe we learn that sharing STILL causes everyone to hate us and that's an indomitable truth that can't be fixed. Maybe there's some interpersonal hiccup that having FCMs doing too much supervising brings to the surface. Regardless, I want to know, and I want to be a part of the change.

Lastly, and this is the most important thing, I only brought myself in front of my boss because I'm responsible for everything. I need to get to the point where I'm exhausted of the same, or similar thoughts, and be so frustrated that all I can do is find an out-of-body place where I observe myself starting to take corrective action. Detaching only goes so far (as the 7 hours I spent writing 311s will attest to) and we all know bitching is just that. I'm not scared I'll fail or present a bad plan or not figure out a way to fix something. I'm scared it will work and that I'll actually be of consequence, and again, get everything I ever want, just in no way, shape, or form it being related to what I would have picked, but for a kind of forgone sublimation and submission of my being to my circumstances.

I hated marching band, until I wasn't obligated to be there, a node on the overall motif, sweaty and burning and wasting my summer, and I've still found it in me to find the community band beneath me and not conducive to my goals as a musician...as if. I don't “hate” DCS, in the same way that I reflexively hate other things, but it has all the hallmarks of what I hate about life more broadly. Will I beat more temperance and patience or tact in my speech and demeanor? Is that what I want? Not really. Will I make the giant dick I'm swallowing at all times go down a little easier when I'm presented with the same obstacles at whatever I'm working on in the future? I mean, I've already gotten creepily re-good at the kind of sociopathic lying I tried to give up during college that makes everyone feel good and believe you're on their side. I hate myself, but not in the way that makes me have to write about it every day, as I’ve learned to have more discretion on what I’m to be blamed for.

I really needed something to look forward to. I can't sit and wait, no matter how hard I try. Maybe I'll cut out something from this gig. Maybe I'll fail forward in an impressive display and at least be distracted long enough to break even in a few months. Either way, the takeaway sentiment is that you should be finding ways to scare yourself into attacking what you're bitching about. It's my only indication that I might be doing something worthwhile in spite of myself, and if the feelings are fleeting, perhaps the work won't be.

[804] Everywhere A Sign

I've been trying to write this for weeks. More, I've been trying to write at all. When you're not overflowing with an idea that's bugging you, or some resounding quote only manages to ring for half a day, but there's still something there, you force yourself to start writing, as I am now, and see if you can piece together a dozen themes and lines into whatever place it is you're looking for.

 

This has been a very long week. Even when I'm doing nothing at work, I'm at work, which increasingly is becoming a chore to bother with without some tactful distractions or pinches of aberrant behavior. I live 45 minutes away. I didn't leave my house until 7:42 on Wednesday, and technically, work starts at 8:00. I'm naughty.

 

But, of course, work doesn't start at 8. Work is understood as this thing we all barely make it to by 8:30, and even if you show up to safety staffing late, you haven't missed something vital, and you're going to be given that benefit of the doubt. It doesn't hurt to use the smoke screen of everyone else feeling tired and being late as well. We're all in this together.

 

I'm hitting that, “This is too easy, wrote, dumb, and impervious to changes for improvement” groove. I get flickers of hope of getting more responsibility or aspiring to do or create something new, and then I sit in a meeting ran by our district manager with endless placations and “state speak” that amounts to, “Don't blame me, we can only do so much over so much time.” My initial back and forth with the literal head of the agency has been dutifully sidelined for over a month at this point. Important people are very busy, don't you know. You won't have to dig far in my writing to find out how much I hate and disagree with the idea that things “just are that way.” And if you're a manager of anything, and reduce yourself to managing away expectations and accountability, you're nothing.

 

Gear shift. I stopped feeling terribly guilty about debt. It feels like a dangerous place to be. I'm slipping into the mindset that, on my worst day, I couldn't be even close to the norm. The money I spend turns into a month's long frustration and guessing game anyway, so why not just try to enjoy the food or toys that help me refine my space and mood? I hung my guitars, and bought things like cables and hooks. My concern for my environment has grown as I've gotten older. I can handle the garage-aesthetic as a matter of being practical, but you know what? I really enjoy seeing my instruments hanging from the wall, and the easy access to switch between them when I'm picking differently tuned songs on Rocksmith. The analog cord so the audio doesn't delay will be worth the $12.

 

I've said it before, but it bears repeating, I work best with someone. I go to the gym when someone's there. I create a coffee shop. I get to crack jokes and discuss options and delve into a perspective I'm not locked into. The things I do alone are always, basically gratifying, but not enough to provoke the endless energy impulse anymore. I've felt the pain of headfirst into walls enough times to at least remain mildly ensured that my enthusiasm and drive means nothing alone, and they are considerably more alone than I had the ability to see.

 

I have a strong personality new girl at work who's rounded, intelligent, and can talk endlessly in a way that doesn't provoke frustration. I barely know this chick and it's kinda insta-friend material. That's what got me intrigued about the office in the first place was finding people who provoked that impulse. The amount of truth in the idea that I don't come to work for the work, but the people I work with, holds as true as it ever did back when I got my first job.

 

It's not a secret we're relational and exist with respect to other things. When I'm out here, alone, playing my guitar or dancing like a nutter, who cares? The hours I could spend on the treadmill or reading won't matter until I take that information or beach bod into the streets and extract attention. I still believe in the exponentiating potential of brains focused on shared goals. I still think some version of the big dream I have for how my life might flow is possible, and possible quickly. I have every day to day reason impressing upon me how much older I'm getting and how I'm barely cobbling together what a 20-something might've half-assedly put together out of college when they dreamed of being a hemp farmer. This perspective informed by my inability to conceive of my life as anything but marred in debt, regardless if I was 3 months or 3 years away from paying it off.

 

Gear shift. One of the themes in my day to day is always about responsibility. You catch cases with DCS when you have no ability to take responsibility. You didn't beat, touch, smoke, whatever it is you absolutely did, and every imposition we make on your being is another affront to decency and example of the fascist state. It's not, simply, meth isn't good for you, and especially not your child.

 

I talk a lot about the responsibility foisted upon me. I was reflecting on my friend who was in a downward spiral with his PTSD. I gave him acid. He'd already had a bad episode, the next was worse. Everyone got mad at me, probably reasonably, not him. I try to frame it by stepping back some. He's old and mature enough to go to war, ship bullets out and ship bodies in, but not allowed to take responsibility of how or when he's going to consume acid, at least around me. There's something to be said about not enabling your friends and knowing better. There's something to be said about the kinds of responsibility towards each other we don't really want to take.

 

The same line of thinking applies to the parties. Camille Paglia pointed out that girls used to have to be home by dark and the boys could go be boys. When girls got their freedom to party, the consequences of drunk hookups became the rape culture of toxic masculinity. Which oppressor do you prefer? The administrator locking you up, or your own hormones and well-sung songs of debauchery related to drinking? Who gets to make the choice not to go? We certainly don't believe rapists can't help themselves.

 

Reverse. I'm comfortable in my space. Even when the power goes out, the air conditioner was running, so it was still comfortable and eerily calm to not even have the frogs making noise. I actively look forward to getting in my chair, sitting in front of my 6 screens, getting distracted and turning on my other big screen to play a game, or reading a few more pages in my book, or rearranging furniture for the 15th time. This place isn't just very me, it's as close to an approximation of the kind of active function-over-form yet packed to the tits with shit to do or find utility in. When I get a chance to organize my tools and have a workspace, it'll be an even sweeter walk between my dozen interests. Even if that takes 6 or 12 months or basically forever because I want it now.

 

I think I'm learning how to “enjoy being” a little better. My drive isn't gone, but my “this couch is niiiice” has definitely increased. I don't scrutinize every dollar if I know I'm going to enjoy the meal. I buy the second Chick-fil-A sandwich at the same time as the first. I think I'm at a record 5 or so days of not having my jaw painfully clenched. Part of me worries this is the consequence of something important dying that I'm unaware of . Part of me wonders if it needed to die.

 

I find it interesting, and telling, and proof that I really do know myself, that I still just wanna hang out. I don't want to pretend to be keeping kids safe and negotiating petty office nonsense. I wanna wake up and hang by the pool until I'm bored, and we go play with this truck engine or 3d model and print something. I wanna watch every single movie I've downloaded, and rewatch movies I claim to have enjoyed, but can't be bothered because no one's said, “I haven't seen it yet!” for me to watch it with them. I wanna have the people on hand to save 2 grand and dig our own damn pool, and to spend the 2 hours studying the parts manual for my riding lawnmower so I can figure out how to repair it. I want the kind of fluidity between interests that takes an incredible amount of work to look so simple and “obvious” a way of conducting life. I want to reinhabit the space farmers and journeymen were before wage slavery.

 

Right now, I am principle resident in situ. I'm carving, by my lonesome, out the pieces that anyone could appreciate and see worked into the psyche like the stripper pole did for the parties. Instinctively, you knew what you had to do. That's what I want this to become. I want it to draw out your inner stripper, and when the field is full of flopping tits, you'll look at me and go, “I get it now.” When I think I'm losing my mind or things are never going to get better, I look around. I remember how I never felt I'd be doing this, typing, in my air conditioned space, with my instruments mounted, books half-read, and growing number of tools to combat the animals and elements. These cumbersome and heavy things that have survived the travel, theft, and weather so arranged as to speak to my vision and will. A command center in Starcraft.

 

I think I'm going to start cold-calling for people looking to rent and dropping in at places that seem like land is where it's at. There's a tree-growing place on the way to Solsberry and different landscaping companies I want to try. It occurs to me that, as far as I know, I still get everything in life I ever truly want, and maybe I just haven't wanted “ the simple ask” to work as well as it might. I'm taken back to when I worked for 2 days at the IU call center. One guy just said, “Yeah, sure, $50 then?” or something to that effect, no hesitation, as if he'd been waiting his whole life to hear my scripted bullshit. I've called hundreds of people just to see if they wanted anything to do with a planter my neighbor invented. I haven't called a hundred people on my own behalf for anything, mostly because I like to present it as I'm working with it, not so much trusting a cold-caller to carry out their half of my vision.

 

I don't know. Can't hurt? Can't damage a brand that doesn't exist but on paper. I've read some entrepreneurial posts who say flyering is more effective than you'd believe. I could create the kind of flyer only someone like me could create, field some calls, explain the vision, draw up some contracts. Reaching out is horrible and everyone's a failure, and, almost as if GOD WILLED IT, I got a job where reaching out to failures has gotten associated with a paycheck. How is that not a sign?

[803] Phat Head

I need to figure out what's on my mind. I've thought about writing for what feels like weeks. I'll get a line, think it'll stick, and then after a day or two I recede into my TV shows, or get distracted and take a nap. Today, I was thinking I'd start my reading adventure. Make it so there wasn't a book I owned (save the 12 boxes I got for free to list on Amazon) that I hadn't read or at least skimmed earnestly through (looking at you cook and massage books). I've been distracted the last couple hours meticulously wiping things down. I'm chasing each spec of dust away, one wipe at a time. I'm genuinely starting to feel like the space looks more like something someone could consider livable, comfortable, and not piled with trash or “stuff” to be sorted like so much excess.

I'm finding it curious that I'm cleaning and organizing, and now writing this, as opposed to jumping into the reading, because my thoughts are occupied about what happens when I get back into “it.” I'm flirting with something bigger than occupying my time. I'm flirting with becoming “me” again. It's slowly occurring to me that what I am, and what I've done, border on a kind of “incredible” dedication and effort that I routinely short change. I look around at all of this effortful organization, and as the picture comes into focus, all of the money, the ticks, the sweat, the frozen treks across an unkind landscape, the trips to and from moving each piece, and the words I've used in service to bringing my ideas into the world, are now manifest.

That's amazing.

I don't know why I have such a hard time appreciating what I am, and how long I've been giving myself to the things I earnestly believe in. There's myself. There's the idea of play and experimentation. There's the ability to be loud. A willingness to be “alone,” and temping of fate in marooning myself in an unfamiliar space removed from so many conveniences. Days like today, I thought would never come, and fuck you, they have. My space is actually mine. My music plays whenever at whatever volume. I reorganize in the middle of the night. I set as many traps for the daring rats as suits me. My things stay where I set them. I can expand in any direction. I can put myself into debt to the tune of 2 months of pithy effort, and be back to safer than I expect many will feel the vast majority of their lives.

I freak out about time because of the expectations I set for myself before I had any grasp of what to expect. I didn't respect the “working world” pace. I don't think it's something you have to adopt, given the pace of technology and the examples set by the biggest brands, but I do think it's something to contend with very seriously. I had no idea how hard it would be to create even a “tiny” space, with the majority of it prefabricated. I didn't think about the rain. I didn't think about brain lesions on the only person I could find to trust in months of searching, nor of being attacked in having my shit stolen and work feigned to be worked or money scammed from my ignorance. I didn't want to believe how not me the rest of the world really is, and the endless tumbling consequences of tripping on my own dick.

What I am is aberrant. I am alone. I am different. It's okay to say it if even the numbers on every personality test affirm it. What I have in common is certainly more than where I differ, but what I differ in is dramatically and emphatically different to tip the scale. I have a dick big enough to trip on, even if every part of me is still human. I've also tended to believe this carries with it a higher level of responsibility and scrutiny. If I want the world, and settle for the moon, I can only seek to continue to admonish myself for the thought of ever “settling,” circumstances be damned. If I have all of my books to read, and manage to finish only a dozen, it doesn't matter that I read 12 books in the time it takes a “regular” person to get through a few chapters. It matters what I could have done, or that I failed my goal. Changing the goal would make me regret “moving the goalposts.”

I don't know how much of this is pathological, and how much of it is functionally necessary. I won't just seek to win, I will seek to make myself indistinguishable. I don't want to be “me.” I want to be the churning out of an organizing and accounting process that can spit it out with the charm and tact that rarely if ever accompanies presumed autism. The problem comes in continually proving it to myself. Then, I will exponentiate, and become what I have to believe will be, as I've described before, insufferable. Aren't I already? Don't I have Wendy, Hatsam, and my dad as the only people who might catch a blog anymore? Have I not chased the rest of the world away and adorned my hillbilly mantel, ready, set, and going off to do whatever it is I'm going to do?

I know I can write this, read an entire book, get practically no sleep, “do my job” to a more than passable degree, get to the gym, eat better, and recycle the process cleaning, practicing, and fitting in my shows on so many drives. I know I could turn it right back on. And then what? How much farther away do I move from the world? How engrossed in my activities should I become? What kind of “expert” at my various crafts will serve my ego? This is the rub. I got a taste of being human. I also enjoy laying in bed all day doing nothing next to someone I care about. The other half of me can't abide. I don't know how to balance both beyond a kind of stasis reflecting and daring myself to pick one.

I have an incredible amount of nervous energy. It's not the kind of whiny anxiety that's so posh and nu-millennial. I persistently worry about my potential, because I literally don't know what I'm going to choose until I choose it. I know my long-term kind of vibe and place I need to be subconsciously, but there are days I'm genuinely surprised I haven't managed to get fired for my mouth or willingness to break things. My spite flame burns eternal there, because god forbid I go down in too tacky or cliché a way, but there are days that push my patience for playing along, and I don't get to just have a good cry and beer and pretend it's getting better. I watch my internal world mold into a grotesque acceptance and coddling trying to cope with the naked shame for what I've become.

I watch the types that I think over-do it, Tom Cruise? The Rock? The term “celebrity energy” that so excited me has another side. They'll die too, even if they look 40 at 140. Do I want to be remembered? I still don't really give a fuck what people think. Here, I consider the company kickball game, where I was fully prepared to drill my new manager in the face pitching the ball if she couldn't catch or get out of the way. I'm not afraid of things in the normal way, only my capacity to indulge, influence, and react to them. “The only thing to fear, is fear itself.” In my experience, I've embodied people's fears. Said what they can't say. Pressed on the one unpressable button. In spite of my endless reservations, poor judgments, and useless opinions, my world is still becoming manifest. Can you say the same?

I seem to find myself wholly unable to even recognize it until I glance at the cleaner and cleaner corners of my garage-turned-homestead. Who knows what liberation I'll feel when I can actually take a shower and do my laundry.

[802] Crack That Whip

What else is new, I'm in a weird head space.

I've spent the last 3 weekends away. I've gotten more back-to-back time suggestive of my layabout and chill life than I've had in maybe a couple years? I miss it. I like having “nothing” to do considerably more than, as Fountains of Wayne so eloquently put it, a desk full of paper that means nothing at all. I can't escape the idea that I'm being punished. I'm not trying to whine or claim a victim narrative, but the nature of the circumstances I find myself in feels personal, and I begin to speculate about who might be behind it.

I'm the king of offering different explanations or finding an out. I can frame all good or bad as good or bad. What I can't do, is persuade myself to embody the feeling of either of those judgments. If I feel bad, I feel bad. If I'm tentatively happy and vibing with the moment, far be it for me to say or do something to try and bring it crashing down. My longest moment is that of the discomfort and unease. It's the “negotiation” of constantly trying to remind and persuade myself that what I have, and where I'm going, are considerably better than they were in the past, and while I might remain perpetually naive as to what it takes to get what I want, I'm still inching along that story line. I'm nowhere near the degree of suffering or depravity I witness daily, skimpering mouse above my head be dammed.

I already claim my corrupted spirit or damaged capacity for a kind of “regular” emotional or otherwise investment in life or other people. There is no secret rotten core I'm trying to keep out of the sunlight so the infection can spread. I still pull myself out of bed and into the office, and slog through what I'm supposed to be responsible for. I do the work. I've never, for a single day, been under the impression that I “deserve” anything that I hadn't worked my ass off for, and I attest to my exhaustive drive to do just that endlessly. I beg those with more power or connections to enable me. I'm piling on ever more debt to solidify my basic level of existence. I've spent the better part of two years in a recliner or on a couch when I'm not at work. It doesn't take me a sprawling mansion and swimming pool to bitch about things with a show on in the background.

Mostly, if I'm being punished, I want to know what I did. I trust the depths of my potential for darkness or aberration, but there aren't any hidden bodies. I don't make a game of trying to make people feel bad throughout the day. I don't “give up” and allow myself to lose my mind or start treating people like I see others do. I don't double down like you might on a terrible drinking night.

So what is it? What loose end am I neglecting so badly that things only seem to move when I'm driven to cut myself a little deeper, and little faster, and with a dirtier blade? Is it unreasonable to think estimates should fall within hundreds and months of what were offered? Is it in poor taste to expect an answer to questions that will determine my spending and budget for several months?

Maybe it was presumptuous to think I could find anyone else remotely capable and trustworthy in the first place. I don't know what the fundamental fuck up it is that I'm making, but I'm convinced I'm making it, and it manifests as little middle fingers and knots in my back throughout the day.

What do I even want to do? What do I want anymore? Someone to help that doesn't cost as much as I make a day. To be able to shave and shower somewhere not public. A fridge would be cool. You see how once I got little things, the asks kept creeping along? There's always something more. Some new “essential” to fill the gap. The flaw in my being then could be the attachment to anything. The want impulse. The investment and desire for a kind of permanence objects simply don't have could be corrupting my whole game.

This would jive with the theme me and my dearest in Lexington spoke of recently. I was wishing I had something more permanent, noting how even the things I've tended to almost my entire life have been stolen. She's more adventurous and takes it as given that things aren't going to last, so why bother getting that invested? There's been a series of past boys who bought in way more than she's been about, she's been all over the world and country. My lens could just be corrupted by an inconvenient pull towards “attachment” to what's otherwise basically sand in the winds of time.

Whether I create or inhabit the environment that's less than fluid, I'm still anchored to my sense of self and certain expectations. My “realness” or “curmudgeon” or “negativity” or “really angry person,” as I was recently labeled, still know full well what a “perfectly flowing” day feels like, and I can do the math on what it would cost to take earnest stabs at what concerns me. Time still feels like it's running out. New and exciting pains in my “good knee” remind me how dead I really am already.

I know the difference between spinning my wheels, and soaking up what I want from myself and other people in our time together. The foundation of my house is questionable, but manageable.

Maybe what I did there's no atoning for. Maybe I'm under a life sentence, and part of it is about not being allowed to know why. It'd be the kind of crime only someone so different as me could pull off. The kind to follow me across lifetimes. That's comforting. At least I could relax the reigns a little bit.