[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.