[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.