[819] The Juggler

Imagine a juggler. Is it a simple picture? 3 balls, the familiar arcs and tosses you’ve seen a thousand times? Or did you go exotic? Chainsaws and a mix-n-match of oddly shaped and weighted items. Maybe it’s still balls, but 7 of them. I don’t know about you, but I see them as red.

This blog is provoked by my kickball. That’s right, I own a kickball. I bought said kickball after trying, miserably, for months to get coworkers to answer emails or provide contact information in the event the weather would allow us to play a game. I got 12-15 to say they’d be interested. I got 2 or 3 to occasionally tell me they’d be busy that, and every other, weekend. After that, the ball no longer looked like this thing with potential to fly and tie together individuals. It stood as another black mark on the concept of community and togetherness, or even just exercise, and the exhausting superficial games and speech we fluidly adopt.

I was asked to bring my kickball to this company “retreat” on Friday. At first, I said yes. After thinking further, I said I’d bring my ball if in the event it got popped, I’d like a new ball. I was told DCS would not be able to pay for such a thing. I said I’d rather have my ball die in service to something I do to it or get-together that comes to fruition because people actually want to be there, and rescinded. One of my bosses said in an email, “You must have a very nice ball!” with all the you’re blowing this out of proportion condescension you could ask for.

My office is like any place you have an array of people. It’s high school. People form clicks. People use their pathological behavior as a more confident manifestation of their take on “adult.” It’s little people with little problems that are elevated to the level of television drama when the actual adults decide to make too many excuses for falling asleep on the job. This high school has no principal, and the array of administrators and school board members that would be responsible for vetting and finding one are merely as qualified to do so by their overburdened years slogging their way to the “top.” They don’t even have to take a test.

I consider my office to be highly mismanaged. Honesty is very easy when you’re jumping between complaints about a client’s stated behavior, and the evidence you present to refute them in court. Interpersonally or professionally? Please. If maybe you talk like a cunt and bring up the wrong topics with the wrong people, consistently, you’ll be talked around for the “learning curve” it would take anyone to straighten out. If you have no experience doing something, and are thrown to the wolves to be of oversight, who cares how long, or if, the meshing and cooling period takes as long as the numbers reflect a certain state.

As such, I don’t feel like I owe them anything. They don’t deserve my good will. They don’t deserve my even theoretical sacrifice of a $20 ball. When I attempt to ask for or negotiate ways I can work more efficiently or competently, I’m denied, every time. When I literally talk to the head of the agency, the feedback is mostly, “there’s always a larger monster to appease.” We’re a mockery of responsibility and the pursuit of as true and consistent a metric under which you could claim “ensuring safety.”

This is a much belabored theme. Why did you get this job? I can tell you, if your first and last answer isn’t “to protect children,” well, dammit, you’re not here for the right reasons. Moreover, when one of your coworkers lapses in judgment and does something irresponsible or in violation of their sacred oath to the office, near tears and veritably screaming it’s WHY CAN’T YOU ALL THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?!? This is the message from our leadership. We don’t explore why an experienced and competent worker would get his dick sucked by a client or client-adjacent. We get his behavior thrown in our face when they don’t know how to account for what’s happening.

My office lost its director to a series of gray-area maneuvers and rumors circling about on-the-clock sexual exploits. What do we think is happening? These haggard civil-servants taking on the lives of hundreds of families a few hours at a time day in and out – do we think their needs outside of work are being attended to? The job pays you just enough to look rich against all of the tragically poor people. It’s a job that will refuse to standardize practice, nor trust your judgment the second someone dusts off an old or forgotten policy. The other experienced heads that the office basically rally around are shifting and leaving their positions as well. The bottom is dropping out, and you’re going to be left with naïve early-20s idealists taking cues from desperate and ridiculous supervisors.

The tragedy is that it can’t get better. It can’t get better because it’s designed so that no one’s really in charge. It’s professional buck-passing. If you’re there for the money, because god-forbid you can be both competent and practical, and you seek anything else, you’ll have to start sacrificing. Take away your individuated voice. Take away your ideas for how things “could” be. Take away the idea that there’s anything to look forward to but stolen time off on redundant “trainings” or a long drive that will eat your entire day.

I was reminiscing on the drive today about the day I first saw my first yin yang symbol necklace. This was before I knew what it was called or really represented beyond this image of balance. I’ve started allowing myself to better-achieve my internal balance. I’m not going to lose my voice or my standards, as they will be vitally important to restoring my path forward when my mind isn’t subsumed by State pedantry and faux civility.

My balance requires my direct, angry speech as it is paramount I see as many honest representations of the world as I can conjure and translate. I was criticized by a supervisor for doing my job for money, then in the next breath told people weren’t even approaching my high-achieving numbers. Then I was told she doesn’t even give a shit if the numbers are that high, in a moment of honest exhaustion, she just really wanted to drill into me the abstraction “child safety,” which in practical adult terms translated to, “I wish you would have asked for help getting this one case in particular started earlier.” The reason it wasn’t initiated owing to its own series of persistent oversights and raised concerns of course also ignored.

How do you end up on the receiving end of another, well what I was trying to say!...conversation? You just have to honestly interact as yourself with someone who’s put up pleasant defenses against accessing where they’d really like to be emotionally or socially. You ugly? No no, you’re now a “take charge” type who thinks citing errant statistics to your mouthy, deeply frustrated, out-performing underling is a wise thing to do. What you were trying to do was be encouraging? You did a shit job. You know you’re not really qualified or liked in the position you hold? Better hammer away at the catch-phrase “My door’s always open!” You know, because that makes everyone begin to understand how “likeable” you really are. We’ll just breeze past whether your advice lends itself to a solution.

I think about balance as it pertains to books and TV shows. Did that book need to get written? Does that show have anything new or worthwhile to say? But they exist, and continue to grow and exist, well-beyond your opinion and musings about their value. I have over a 1000 books I intend to put up for sale and 95 percent of them I’ve never heard of nor would have any interest in. I’m an uninteresting book to the vast majority of people in my life. What I do on each page will look precisely like this blog, as reflections and justifications for what can perhaps be considered a life worth living verses a life merely lived. It means writing the book in the face of all the others. It means protecting the voice that sees your bullshit and counters with an excruciating ability to make you actually start to feel bad about it.

I’m looking forward to the circus. In less than a month, it’s back to being evenly broke. Then what will I juggle? Then how much more of my voice and intention do I let bleed into my diminishing sense of obligation? I haven’t even cracked the surface of the kind of consequences I could bring, good or bad. I’m in an environment that’s begging me to be vindictive and crush its fledgling soul. Is a person who talks like that really one you want to bank on his bleeding heart not to do so? Because it would probably hurt the children, but in the interim, would also hurt my paycheck. I’m asking, don’t you think you deserve the fallout equal to the unnecessary pain you inflict by not being honest and taking responsibility? When is it your turn?

In the purest form of fascism, The State obligates you to protect its image. If this blog had my name attached to it, and the wrong person read it, I could get fired for criticizing. We’ll do heinous things, ignore explicit and deliberate obvious courses of action to fix something, and then fire the groundlings when the heat intensifies. Do this for 25 years and you might just get the chance to bitch that you’ve got too much on your plate to the people whose day you’re interrupting putting out their own fires! We’re a microcosm for the broad lack of leadership modern trend. Trump doesn’t get elected because leaders are paying attention to the right things. States don’t go red after being blue because individual party chairs gave a damn about the effort it really takes. Agencies don’t build into their ethos that people will always be coming and going unless they’ve no interest in what it takes to retain the kind of talent that wants to be appreciated and grow, but who literally can’t be seen for the engines that keep the whole thing running that they are.

You want the best argument ever for why it’s imperative for you to be honest with yourself and what you’re doing in life? The agency tasked with taking your children can barely keep its shit together for longer than 3 months at a time. It’s not that people doing the work can’t or are deliberately malicious. The people in charge are stuck on party lines and lies about the nature of the job and what constitutes working. When things go wrong, they find a scapegoat. When a concern is raised, the conversation transforms. You need a smart, honest, genuinely forgiving and simultaneously ruthless and observant person on the ground willing to fight from both ends to keep things knitted together. You think those types are just lying around, or willing to take a grand every two weeks for the privilege of a constant shit storm?

[818] Lock & Key

Something I'm unsure if I get enough credit for is in the amount of things I'm not saying. I may write a 9 page blog, but that doesn't mean I've shut off. I might have knocked a great insult out, but a dozen more pieces of nonsense are eager to get a more strained chuckle or sideways glances. For me, the capacity to shut anything off, or at least turn it down, is what dampens my otherwise bucket of superpowers. Laser eyes that cut everything down in sight or flight when you can never land wouldn't be considered ideal.

I think about this as I think about my new posture towards work. It coincides with how I've seen myself evolve around coworkers. If I can get away with a little, there's little to nothing that suggests to me I can't take more. I follow rules when it's in my clear self-interest. I eschew being a martyr for ignorance and arbitrary, if not well-meaning, rules. It's me playing with fire to feel “perfectly comfortable” with a position that stands in opposition to the long-term stability of whatever it is I happen to be doing.

Interpersonally, say I start to get comfortable around you. This is a problem. I've had to get comfortable around you. This means I went through the process of figuring out why we don't naturally get along, and then I drop my defenses, and start to carry-on as though we're actually meant to be around each other. This was highlighted today by a coworker that's the definition of the type of Millennial that would get me fired calling a comment I made “problematic,” while chuckling, as my fundamental ability to make your out betray your in attempted cordiality.

With work, it's a lot like school. I have a built-in anxiety mechanism for not following a certain kind of structure or occasionally reasonable rule. I don't like to be late, even when it doesn't matter. I don't want to leave a ten minute task staring at me, even if my life will literally not go any direction positive or negative if I sit on it for weeks. I rush to cross the street when I'm jay-walking because a car will and deserves to win against my bravado.

My issue is that I know full well I don't have to care. People say they don't care when they're trying to put distance and deny things. I literally don't care and invite crazy shit into my life to force me to start caring. Any inch of liberty you decide to take in your life when your personality is situated that way is suspect by definition. Is the demon winning? Or are you making reasonable accommodations? Will it get out of hand? Or is enough at stake that you could reign it back immediately if necessary?

For as much as we talk about finding personal fulfillment, joy, passion, happiness, or non-shame-worthy tools to cope, I think we miss the conversation on the kinds of dishes we're serving to our emotional diabetes. I've existed in brazen not-give-a-fuck modes for very long periods, and maintain a kind of resting hum. They don't exactly work against me. I'm very rarely interested or affected by the long-term opinion of someone I don't respect or organization I want nothing to do with. I'm the person who will work your style or mantra until you're forced to reflect. I'll use your language to manifest a world you can't recognize.

So what then and what does that even mean? It just means I'm testing and playing. My anxiety, is a choice. It's the choice to sit in inaction and not rise to the level of defiance or protest I consider it my moral imperative to assert in defense of my soul. The difference between that inner revolution braving a new world, and dying in ignoble slaughter, is the understanding and management of the battleground. My mind is a minefield and my daily interactions are like singular firecrackers trying to antagonize an animal. The game requires a kind of balance no one else can do for me, and that's key to tamping doubt without overburdening your own righteous sense about your actions.

I think you want me nervous and stuck being quiet parsing through the unknowns. I think you want it because I'm a ferocious person who feels fundamentally unpredictable. I think the world attempts to train me every day how to play along and play nice, but this bug in my system can never erase the skepticism and scorn for the environment I see being cultivated, ironically, in spite, of me. Whether I literally get on a stage or buy into hippie-musings about my “celebrity energy,” I'm getting ready to burst. Whether it's like an Andy Dick or Kardashian or something bordering respectable is unclear. But it starts with these seemingly simple acts to beat away the memory of stomach butterflies. It's when assertion rules over defense and maintenance. It's when the abstract amalgam subsumes all former judgments and convictions and compels you to watch. The craving is starting to take over.

[817] Incurable Rash

I really think I'm just writing this to try and help put myself to sleep. I already hate it, and think it will be the kind of boring reserved for the thoughts that you have right before you should be falling asleep.

I don't hate my job. I hate how my job is making me feel, and I don't think I can continue to approach my job with even the pithy sentiments regarding the ease by which I tend to do it, or the time it has otherwise allowed me in marginally larger doses than other jobs I've had. I hate getting nit-picked over nonsense by my supervisor. I hate being a hand of generalized poorly-understood philosophy about what constitutes “safe” and our capacity to contribute to it. I hate that I have the same conversation. I hate that I'm sliding back into feeling very comfortable using the word “hate” liberally.

Increasingly, I don't do well with things that are going well. If I get to see a friend, I'm like a child who can't transition into bedtime (like now maybe) or cope with school. It could be like this, I think to myself. I could have someone I get along with. I could have a collaborator or someone to talk to that isn't veiled by the pleasantries of professionalism and arbitrary adulthood. My reports feel that much dumber when I'm reflecting on the kind of weekend I want to return to. My inevitable staffing discussions feel “lost” like some competition for the soul and memory of accountability and competence.

I applied for a new job. There's, apparently, a team inside The State that takes data and problems and figures out ways to address them at individual offices. You'd work at your kind of own 90-day pace. You travel. You get off at 4:30 and don't have to worry about getting assigned a new report from a family on fire. I really want this job. I don't really want this job, because it's going to have all of the same problems that go along with The State, but I really want this job. It pays a touch more. It might let me work from home. I won't have the opportunity to take my mood-swinging brain and dump the fallout in front of people who, probably deserve it, but will in no way serve me were I to try.

I'm so cognizant of the hurt. When I can't resolve my reality to a kind of middle ground, it's literal pain. Headaches are often. Shoulders go on lock. My stomach churns. My eyes might as well start bleeding. Every day that you learn something or you get a glimpse of the kind of pursuit that fills you up is a day you feel as intensely wasted on the practical and mundane. Is other nonspecific drama worse than feeling as though a corrosive agent is working its way through your veins? Is seasonal precarious labor to cover the ground unwise short-sidedness if you don't feel alive slogging through?

I've been in something of a panicked state for the last few hours. I did a little make-up work that piled on while I was gone “training” and interviewing. I got my laundry done. I've eaten considerably more sugar and shit than normal. I'm the kind of tired that should have never started to write this, but the sooner I fall asleep, the sooner I'll be on my way to work. Work is where I'll make my coffee, sit down and sink to hell in my chair, click around my screen pretending to be earnestly reading as I silently curse myself for being trapped. I'll sit and discuss my cases, get a dumb new list of things to do, and then find myself with half a day gone, ready to take an extended lunch, before breaking down again and rapid-fire knocking out what has become too heavy to keep avoiding. You know, healthy productive professional problem solving.

I want to watch more bad and weird movies with friends. I want to attack yard-work at twilight so I'm not sweating to death and without the day's mental exhaustion clinging to me. I want to take a sick or personal day tomorrow to help align my disposition with the overwhelming “fuck you” that's showing up more often. I really hope I don't do anything too rash, but the cracks are showing. I even used the word “hope,” if it's any indication the rough waters I'm swimming in.

[816] On Complex Thought and Layered Meaning

I've written several versions and limbs of this blog before. I might link to them as the mood finds me, but for now, I want to see how much has been lost in the time I've waited to begin writing.

I get both mildly flattered and a touch uncomfortable when I'm told I'm smart. I'm not embarrassed about understanding things, and I certainly lord myself over the things and people I think I get better than they get themselves. It doesn't mean everything boils down to manipulation, but it's been hard to get into a flow of my social work job without receding into a kind of character I've long since stripped of its playful novelty. Whether you think there's different veins of intelligence or not, I think you need a kind of baseline.

What are things people have considered smart? We'll use the term "genius-level athlete." We like to find scientists who, by virtue of their field, are genius for even being able to pronounce certain terms, let alone manipulate them. Brilliant writers wrap us up in stories and capture imaginations of millions well-independent of personal taste or general familiarity of literature. Hell, if you thought my writing was awesome, Grammarly would punch us both in the dick and dare us to pay a premium to get rid of "incorrect" passive voice.

Across the potential domains of intelligence, there's a degree of complexity. Can you figure out the mind-games the quarterback is playing with the defense? No? He's brilliant! Can you fluently swing between keys and read the mixolydian pattern as the improviser wails? Fuck no? "I could never do that!" If you don't speak the language, and you regard the potential gibberish to translate as respect and admiration, extreme consequences can follow. This is as true for those bent on hero-worship as it is for those who believe everything they tell themselves.

We also make a distinction between being smart and being wise. Wisdom can learn from someone else's mistake, and it's merely smart to learn from your own. Wisdom watches. Often, we have a solemn respect for the person remaining calm in the storm, letting things play out, or maybe only feigning a degree of disinterest. The reactive hothead gets put in their place. The mad scientist doesn't bet on the unified heart of the world who'd revolt. The tale of ego or pride destroying in very foreseeable ways is persistent lore for a reason.

I like to say several things at once. I like to be in the middle of a dozen things. My best blog titles, to me, are when they stand for at least 4 or 5 things. Maybe a song title comes to mind that seems to capture the essence, and then happens to have killer relevant lines if you know the words. Maybe it ties itself in a nice bow to the last line. My brain automatically tends to run in different directions at once, and it gives zero shits if I'm comfortable picking one road or another. Try as I might, I'm often reacting. I'm feeling something turn or drop in my stomach. I'm persuading myself the dread is something less significant, and it's my burden, nay, “mature duty,” to combat it until the next practical reality can roll around.

Today provided some insight into that. I was getting my job done. I was making my rounds. I had a plan to write up some loose ends. I was going to be done early. I started getting afraid. It was too easy. I was playing along. I knew the tasks and just did them in a line. When I got to the end of the line, then what? So I sabotaged it. I let the last hour of my day go to some bullshitting and tying up one loose end instead of 5 or 6. What are we supposed to say about this?

I don't like the band Tool. I find their music boring, and every time I try, I just can't. Their “complexity” is often cited. Complexity for complexity's sake I've never considered compelling. Me telling you of the dozen things I'm doing half-assed isn't compelling either. It doesn't make me move on them any faster, nor does it make me proud to tell you how far I haven't gotten. I could write the 12 minute song that spends the first 4 minutes adding an extra note, instrument, or flourish. I could also attempt to write a 4 minute song that says more than “because I can.” Is there a degree of “smart” or “wisdom” in doing either? Is my inability to be brought to tears by Tool, as one reviewer I read, simply my inability to appreciate the beautiful and brilliant language?

This all would matter less to me if we didn't make terrible judgements based on our impressions of these tastes and capacities to understand. I'll never quite swallow that Trump is president. For my brain, attempting to run in every direction, the reaction to that news and fact is to so many suicidal and dark places, it's genuinely hard to spend any time reflecting without wanting to give up. What do you say to the absence of organized thought? What do you say to burned nuggets of wisdom? What's the exercise of existing when survival is predicated on both strangling as damming a selfish conception of yourself in the world as it is denying anything beyond you exists?

There's a way to describe the insanity of a chaotic mind as “it's own kind of intelligence.” I'd call this disingenuous, but we do it all the time. We don't want to believe the people we associate with don't have their niche. We prefer the polite language of “accepting differences” where the language of cutting dead weight would be better suited. This especially when it's “family.” This proclivity when we feel ashamed or are reminded of when we've slipped. To my mind, insanity comes in equal doses as opportunities to create a little order. Then we make the “wise” move to incorporate it into our language, even if in practice we have no idea if we're keeping a balance or managing to grasp the concepts of “order” or “chaos” altogether.

Order feels very tired. I got my house in order, and the loudest indicator of how to spend most of my time has been to mostly watch TV. I wish I felt worse about that. It's not like before, where that's all I really could do. Now, I'm doing it after I spend my whole day utterly subsumed by order. I don't make the rules. I barely rattle the cages for a little leeway here and there. I'm tired after work, not because it's hard, but because it's easy. Watching TV makes me tired. Doing the grunt work of scanning and organizing books does the same thing. Trying, and failing, half a dozen times to uproot a stubborn tree makes it one more.

The individual daily acts that eat up your time and disengage you are what we add up at the end to claim a form of “meaningful life.” How many rallies did you go to for your designation as “long-time activist?” How many classes do you teach before you're a cherished educator? How many times do I get to be told the work I'm doing is important before I start to believe it? Does it matter if I don't know where August went as long as a few dozen families got a slightly milder impression about the imposing nature of DCS? What if I was pretty-much dead inside the whole time they were thanking me? What if every sacrifice I made for them made me resentful for not recognizing similar ones made in service to me?

How quick and easy it would be at this point to resolve to the complex nature of being. “Everything is everything!” “It's just a ride!” “Karma, bro!” Why acknowledge and work with your own experience, especially if you can't trust it, especially when there's an infinite justification to keep it playfully light and confusing?

I continue to return to the idea that it has to be by you and for you, but to the extent that you even bother to describe yourself, and to the ability to orient and depict accurately. Trump voters have the 3-10 ego lines, and that's their existence, so burn everything else down. Radical leftists have the religious idealism that serves the same purpose. The idiot merely needs to speak and dance. The intelligent can hide behind their complex-sounding narratives or philosophies that amount to “I'm scared too, and can't be bothered.”

If you get a thousand bad reviews for your deeply personal work (and, lo, what isn't deeply personal?) should you care? Should you care if it sells like Oprah? Should you care if you're prepared to recant and be forgiven before you die? The ego-driven YouTube “celebrities” and charging bulls of housewife fables aren't slowing down. The entertainment sits ass-to-face with the news for thousands of scrolls. Where do you exist in it all? Watching? Reporting? Capitalizing? Fighting as hard as an immigrant kid with all the pizazz of a pyramid scheme pitchman? Do you know the difference between your story and struggle, and the words laid before you? Do I? Can I?

You know what I want before I'm exhausted doing whatever it is I want to do? Someone to do it with. And more than that, real individuals with their own thoughts and fights and words that when mixed with mine create a better narrative and we discover the working wisdom. I want my best conception of my friends to hold true and to believe there's more than just biding my time until the list of tasks is inevitably done, and the paycheck hits, and the options for dinner are within driving distance. Who's qualified to review you besides those who know you? And who knows you but the ones who are paying attention for your sake and for theirs? Who am I trying to impress? For how long has it been the abstraction of what I take to be people's conception of me to live up to the hype? You know who never asks me what I'm doing? Almost everyone.

So is it time to wisely move on from another mild mental crisis and get back to organizing books and reinforcing shelves? I'm certainly going to finish the last 3 episodes before I get to 450 in One Piece. Should I approach my next 3 days off of training-vacation with renewed vigor at the prospect of learning how to forensically interview children? Should I sleep a little sounder knowing I got more confusing, laughably “wise” or “smart” words out for me to read a thousand times looking for what I really said later? Does it matter? Do you care? Do I? I've watched myself over the last few weeks, months, and years, and keep seeing it manifest as words. I don't know what to make of them, or myself. I don't know that I want anymore access or luxury than I have now, as I'm almost positive I'd have so little occasion to share it. If only because I'm perfectly ignorant about what I can provide, or what it is that's really needed.