[823] Crunchy Boi

Maybe I want to die.

I was in a car wreck tonight. According to the woman who I was involved in it with, I was coming around a corner fast. According to me, she was in the middle of the road. It was dark and it just rained. Who wins?

I'm not even tempted to admit fault. My instinct is marred by experience, and I work for the State. If what you say is 10% or 5% true, it's used to infer 100%. I lost a wheel to my car. She didn't have insurance. Does it mean anything? I don't think so. It's another bill. It's not even a “lesson.” We both probably already knew dark corners in the rain at the speed limit or otherwise can prove perilous. A deer in the day time that recently nicked my side mirror can attest to that.

I can't help but to think the worst. I feel like I'm perpetually daring life to get harder than it needs to be - to show its nasty face and stop pretending. I can't help but to believe that just as I “escape debt,” I find myself with a totaled car. It's like a cliché television episode. I can't help but to think that for every time I make a joke about dying on the highway, your god is up there saying, “I'll show you, you son of a bitch.” I feel like my task, having come into focus, to pay down or trade down for a car without debt has been “solved” in the most ridiculous and not-appropriate way depending on how the insurance plays out.

The major takeaway, mind you, is how I feel like I'm watching. I don't mean in some kind of traumatized or processing shock kind of way. I feel like I'm sort of carrying on and extremely calm when “real” happens. I'll find myself in a panic politely contemplating the direction of my life on a lunch break or pop a blood pressure machine when I feel on the verge of things being “too easy” in the money-making from drug studies. While I'm sliding after colliding down a country road? I feel, “of course.”

I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop. I want to get the tragedy over with. I want to crack the joke, bust out the broom, and have the money stock-piled waiting to pay for the series of miscalculations and misdeeds. I fundamentally don't believe there's a reason or plan you don't create for yourself. The lady in the accident had Christian music blasting and commented, “It all happens for a reason, I can't see what it is right now, but you gotta believe that.” I told her that I tag that sentiment with, “It doesn't mean it's a good reason.”

I feel stuck. I feel like there's almost too many things to say, and absolutely nothing. Big and little disasters happen all the time, and they're indifferent. That's the point. I suppose I've been living amidst a series of small disasters that are totally fixable with a little forethought, responsibility, and accountability, and they don't get fixed. Why should I believe those “virtues” would save me for the “big” things? Why should I think, whether it's a car wreck or a conversation, anyone is going to learn or get the clue that life really is short and you should aspire to more than the piddling excuse we hold up for each other on the daily?

I don't matter but for the smallest of individuated circumstances. Car crashes put us in our place. A brief error or oversight erases your chance to do any more good or bad, and it doesn't even have to be your own. So drink and be merry? Use every tool you have to reach every end? Live in spite of the indifference by caring so gosh golly hard others feel inspired by you?

Another perverse angle I entertain is that I've self-sabotaged yet again. Get out of debt? No no, you can't handle the freedom, let's tack on $1000 deductible and keep you safe another two weeks. Part of me thinks the only way I feel I can “deserve” my station in life is if I get there through every possible kind of fuck up and strife so that I'm not tempted to revel in it too sweetly. How unbelievably fucked would that be if this were true? What if there was nothing that could be done to stop it?

Let's talk about the irony of maybe wanting to die. If I wanted it sincerely enough, I couldn't just get a gun and blow my head off. I couldn't even rely on our broadly safe cars and folly of drivers. I'd have to find a way to cut myself ten thousand times in physical and psychological ways. I'd have to feel like I earned my death as much as I've had to crawl and beg through the pain and frustration to get where I have so far. Maybe there's a war going on inside for how vicious each side of my life and death impulse will behave.

I don't want anyone to be scared, because I'm not. I am, and forever will, remain confused though.

[822] Chronically There

Let's see if we can figure out what's going on.

Since about 9:30 this morning, I've been in a low-level panic. The last 2 days I've had a weird off and on sleep thing happening, either crashing as soon as I get home and waking up at midnight, or sleeping from like 11 to 3, and then trying to “nap” between 5 and 7. I'm fairly well caught up on work tasks, and even doing “extra” in reading this book they want me to summarize in less than 1500 words. I'm fed, gorging myself on a pack of cookies, entreating myself to both IKEA meatballs and Portillo's in the same evening. I've been healthy, organized, and had my builder complete some more lining of my room, helping the temperature even out in my bathroom. I've plans for the weekend and the weekend after.

As my deskmate pointed out, if I'm feeling panicked, there's something stirring in your subconscious. There's never just “no reason,” much as I tried to point out it's not a “disorder” because it needs a reason. If I'm unable to claim a disorder, it leaves me begging to speculate. I have suspicions I'll explore, and with any degree of luck or deliberate thought, I'll return to simply biding my time until better things happen verses fight the compulsion to restart clenching my jaw and coaxing headaches.

My job drowns you. Whether you want it to or not, you're dealing with people. People are uniquely tied to people. A dog can bark at you all day, it's not the same thing as someone cussing you out. We expect things out of our clients. We cross our fingers for a degree of civility when we're pursuing some bureaucratic, but seemingly ridiculous, course of action. I'm finding myself dreaming about scheduling and conversations I've had. This is the big “secret” as to “why I couldn't do your job” that rarely gets talked about out loud.

Paperwork isn't hard. Clicking the same buttons for the majority of families on our semi-crappy software isn't hard. Driving, generally, to locations 5 to 20 minutes away, and occasionally across the state isn't that hard. Embodying trauma, excuses, lies, and “don't take this personally” commentary as people just fail on top of failure gets hard. Doing it with no reprieve gets harder. Doing it and being needled over petty and small-minded “concerns” from laughable “leadership” is damn near impossible.

I, maybe, have 5 days a month. Every other day is spent anticipating work, or talking about work. The people I know? I work with them! So there is no getting drunk together without another few hours discussing all the “crazy.” I don't really “do” anything else. I spend my time trying to avoid, not trying to grow or learn. I spend it feeling older than anyone can actually guess I am. (Someone guessed 26 yesterday). I don't feel like I've the energy to do much when I get home but continue the conversation of whether or not to get a jump on tomorrow, so if and when the existential crisis hits, I won't exacerbate the panic by taking a 2 hour lunch.

I'm seeing so little of “me.” I can't talk like I want, not really. I can't explore the topics I want without feeling distracted and exhausted. You'd think, just start reading, no? Just pop your head into a fantasy, or pick up some new factoids. But it doesn't work like that. The information has no room to breathe. It's just words on a page I'm letting slip by.

I think it's worse than that though. It's the sinking feeling that things, broadly, are so much worse than I have words for, and they can't and won't get better. I've been repeating the line, “it's the little things” to myself a lot. Little shifts in how we operate can mean big stressors are alleviated. Little decisions to streamline the process don't get made. Lengthy appeals to leadership get smiled at and ignored. Little attempts to indulge or distract serve the opposite effect. Things don't connect or translate. I don't feel the causal well-intentioned sense or discussion ever working towards anything meaningful.

How the fuck do you fix that? I don't get my sense of identity from work, which subsumes a great portion of my life. I don't get support in trying to map my perspective on making work better. I don't get the impression that for all of the “adults” in the room they could hold a candle to the kind of leadership and example it would take. I run the risk of overburdening the friends or acquaintances I have in looking for something that's not their burden or theirs to offer. And every day I'm just supposed to show up, report, and carry on like there isn't a tear down the middle of my existence, my hand clenched with needle and thread so tight I'm bleeding.

I have an otherwise perfect life. I have too much stuff. I have a brain that works. I have toys. I have people who care about me (sociopath lists them 4th? Jesus) I'm still not too fat. I've managed to keep my car accidents at hitch and deer hitting. My friends are rich enough to let me chance spinning out of control in their sports car. But I can't make the little shifts? I can't prevent the panic from setting in as I stare at the blank depressing walls and recite the office mantras? If there's any word I overburden, it's absolutely irony. Perfect relative to what? To when I didn't have so much stuff? To when I naively believed in a “better” kind of future? To yours? I didn't use to panic all the time. I didn't use to walk around so fluidly as a mockery of what was going on in my bones. I feel I've taken my pragmatism too far, and am finding it incredibly hard to see where I exist.

[821] Orgasm Addict

I just want to write a bad blog because my head wants to hurt. I've been recording and organizing the books I got for free. The journey we've been on together has amounted to a fair amount of effort for so far indiscernible gain. I can't help but to view it as a larger persistent analogy.

I'm all about the probabilistic thinking. I very much doubt anyone's particular “brilliance” or special effort. I believe there's more luck involved even before I pick up a book making a case for just how much. As such, whatever the cost of these books in labor or space, the ideas they give me remain invaluable. I want to hold them hostage as a sales tactic. I want to create ways of quickly organizing and displaying them. I want to try to read some of them.

If life is a similar series of a kind of randomness, I want to set myself up for as many “what to do with all these books?” kind of scenarios. Ideally, the books are supposed to be a series of individuals with a capacity for honesty and introspection you don't otherwise find in a “normal” distribution of people. It's as much the experimentation in business running or marketing as it is toying with websites and general attention seeking. I think the secret to my success will be tying everything I do to everything else. You came because you read a crazy flier. You stayed, or you bought something, because I made it part of my world, and you wanted to be associated.

I think a lot about an infinite sea of associations. Whether I remember the character names or not, I'm associated with thousands of stories. I have a familiarity, or parity of experience. I think a lot about the confused, almost angry look I got from an acquaintance when I said I watch some shows sped up. She didn't understand opening as many small doors of connection as possible. I take it she's getting all she needs from her life.

I think about comedians who say they sounded like their favorites when they first started out. Who do you sound like if you don't put in the time and effort to differentiate? What happens when you no longer borrow from enough sources to push the needle on the topics of importance and interest? This is the concern I have for myself right now. I have a thousand worlds staring at me from the corner. I have books on construction. I have Oprah's book club stamps across covers. I have as many windows for new insight as I do in looking for lines that stick in my thousand TV shows. And they're heavy. Any they fall over when you stack them too high. And they're covered in dust and make me sneeze, and are in “good” to “acceptable” condition, waiting to waste their life on someone else's shelf who can shell out the four dollars.

I think about helping yourself before you can help others. For how many years have I tried to differentiate between the “right and wrong kind of selfish?” My thoughts came from what seemed like nakedly self-destructive acts meant to put distance and shame in the space where a conversation and personal responsibility needed to take place. As I get older, I feel I need to be more conservative with myself. It's harder to juggle things that aren't arranged in a way that makes things simpler. It's harder to have the patience for really bad words and wasted time where an adult or consequences are necessary. It's hard to watch yourself act in a way that seems to betray where your mind was most at ease. Does it have to get hard before it's easy? Or are we just trying too hard to run too many poorly conceived ideas at once?

Whether or not I get my bills paid in advance, the way my life is organized, I'll still need ten thousand dollars a year. Cars need registered and property taxes are a thing. I'm tied to the grid and can't share my piddling thoughts without the interwebs. I'm freer, but I'm not free. I've got people in mind I'd like to spend that extra time with. I've got less than the naive hope it would take to think it's going to amount to more than a weekend or so year without some perfectly random intrusions of money or impropriety.

So I think about the slog. I think about the little pieces I put in place for the families I interact with every day. I think about picking up the pieces and giving the direction they can't seem to find for themselves, and I think about having someone to do that for me. I think about how that plays into me not going to the gym unless it's with someone. I was recently invited to run, something I wouldn't have done on my own, so I ran. I think about wishing I had someone to call me a fat cunt every day, daring me to eat better, so I could have that push-back and accountability. Discovering or respecting that someone has intention or credible expectations of you is something I can get behind and find motivating.

Here I want to break off a bit and explore intention verses attention.

I like attention. I don't want it for its own sake, but I'm always seeking the laugh or the admiration and respect for when I do something better or different. I truly felt at home when I was on stage at Warped. I walk into rooms and theaters, and envision myself giving speeches. I rehearse what I'll say on Colbert. I know, just by virtue of my personality, I'm a literal aberration from the norm in ways that will garner attention. I speak different. I respect my feelings less. I approach problems from an assumed inevitable creative way it can be fixed or reduced. I always want to bite. Containing or organizing that is the task of life. Making it something worth courting those who would find their own intentions with it is the work worth doing.

When I intend to do something, the rest fades. The drive doesn't feel so long. The show isn't a painful marathon of intermittent focus. The day at work isn't the thing otherwise impeding my only route to happiness. It takes the smallest goal to get there. It's why I love food. Whatever else in your day, you get to have a goal with a high probability of a great pay-off and feeling. I don't know who's going to choose to yell at me instead of engage when I call people, but I do know how the burger is going to taste. I can prove the value of my intention.

The larger task? Can you pretend to know the influence of an intentioned life? Can you regard the consequences as “good” on faith? If it doesn't fill you up like a good meal, can the value be measured in other ways? I certainly find myself able to invest more of my time and effort into others' lives when I feel like I'm getting things done and organized in my own life. I remember just the act of doing my laundry made me feel considerably better about typing up the notes on a few cases a few weeks ago. So what's going to last longer than a meal or spin-cycle? With any luck, and some work, your relationships. Your investment and intention for other people.

I suspect this is why people express what having kids has meant to them. I suspect this is why so many kids are living out the consequences of neglect and people grow to resent each other. If you genuinely care, all of the adages about helping other people being the highest calling or way to draw the most from your lived experience may prove to be true. If you hate yourself and/or the space you occupy in the world, it's going to be someone else's problem, one way or another. This is the baggage I attempt to keep from dumping on people. I share what I hate or think you're doing wrong. Rarely are you in a place to engage or cope with that. I don't always react to being triggered in ways I respect either.

Existing in the space as someone else's problem is familiar to me. I've often felt like something to be dealt with or compromised around. If the mean wasn't paired with the funny, I'd be that much lonelier. If I wasn't smart enough to talk my way out of something ridiculous, how much more trouble would I find? If I wasn't large and angry enough to silence, at least to my ear, a degree of immature emotional dissent, how many ways would I find myself petty and distracted by fake villains or tyrannical justice? It's my intention to not be at the mercy of the world that gives me my value. I'll take the judgment as the worst if, by the numbers, I can prove to be better or the best. I'm certain I'll identify a stream of quantifiable problems related to you and your environment while you over-burden the value of your gut reactions or prescribed morality with regard to me. I can maintain my standard for friendships and allow myself the view from the eyes of the people who dare to say they love me (which I still discourage, though less emphatically than I used to) or make them think.

Perpetual good is the smallest shift when it's at the hand of the collective in the right direction. I alone might need ten thousand dollars a year in order to live minimally first-world. That's 5 months of my current time-stupid job. Together with your resources? I don't want to say I'll never know, but the divorces and mid-life crises definitely haven't kicked in yet. I also won't give you the credit to think you've got more you'd like to do than get by the way you are. I'll never be able to tell whether that's bad or good beyond the amount I'm able to lodge my way into your head as the problems I have with things wedge their way into mine.

[820] Give Me Liberty

Depending on your state of mind, what gets in gets dictated.

I wanted to start writing when it seemed as though there might be a crack in my otherwise “generally feeling better” last week and a half. I went into town, ate dinner, and upon returning to my car to check my work phone, saw that I had missed an appointment. I completely forgot about the appointment, but it was also missed because I took a sick day, and went the opposite direction of the idea that I should check in or touch bases. I was mildly perturbed and about to spiral into “What does the manager I like think of me now!” and “I said I didn't want to turn into [our boss who got fired for being too fuck it, literally] is this the change taking over?” I dropped the feeling immediately. That's not the game I'm playing anymore.

I've always been suspicious of people who've decided to see me in particularly positive lights. I know this is a pretty common disposition. Everyone knows the depth of their own depravity, and it's something of a cliché across mediums the story of “it's not you, it's me.” Mine has always been about the capacity and potential for undue manipulation. I don't want people to give themselves over to me. I won't turn you into a Project White Boy, well, mostly. I'll push until you break. This happens frequently to people who “want to be my friend,” and completely ignore the amount of times I try to caution them as to how it will go wrong.

But let's slow down and parse a little further. I had a feeling, and got rid of it. Others who have positive feelings around me, I'm broadly suspicious of. One would think, don't you want people to think well of you? What's the harm in that? I immediately think these are people who've experienced a soul-crushing amount of negativity and judgment, and who are blind to the prospect that no one likes you. Sure, but they extra don't like when you're a credible threat.

More to my circle of adjacent points though, being viewed positively in others' eyes does not seem to translate to me like I suspected it would. Whether you're good or bad, basic competency will have extra responsibilities foisted upon you. In theory, if people like you, you'll catch less crap, but that's anyone's guess, and increasingly less my experience. It's not your opinion of me that garnered the cash to do the things I actually want to do. In fact, I had to basically disappear into a shell of watching and reading so as to pass the time without feeling like a convict. I'm fairly certain I got my current job because my boss immediately recognized I'm not that nice or going to put up with too much shit.

Let's try to land on another line I was ruminating on the drive home tonight. I'm curious about “points of random convergence.” I like it for it's contradictory nature. Minds operate like this to me. You don't know all the different things that are going to come in to your mind. How they get spit out are almost perfectly arbitrary but for the convergent nature of speech or the explicit action you take. When I come across a handful of things that all seem to be speaking to a similar theme, is it so much a “happy coincidence” that the show, book, line from a movie, and sentiment from an acquaintance would all resonate the same way? Easier to understand is my mind being primed to look for sentiments that fit the mold.

For me, it's ideas regarding the kind of randomness and arbitrary nature of how things are connected. As such, there's loads to think on with the show Undone. I'm reading “Fooled by Randomness” which tries to make the case for wisdom and long-term accounting and probability in the face of immediate gains or losses. To an infinitely small degree I can anticipate the reaction to me being a dash of negligent in my duties today, but everyone I could bother to include in my mental calculation has their own kids, own lives, and as many chances to be influenced as to how to react to me as I'm searching to employ towards them.

Something that's important for me to hold on to is the ability to take in and analyze or work with the inputs. I already know the story of “show up to work long enough for x amount of dollars until things incrementally improve.” It's the story I'm trying hard to persuade myself against that it's worth quitting in the next few months over. Today was a good example of my days before I was obligated to show up to work. I slept until I wanted. I got bigger chunks of the side-projects and “time-waster” things I enjoy doing. I liked my life doing those, while I dreamed of “doing more.” I like my life less with this job while I continue to do the same mental mistake of thinking there's much more I could be doing.

I don't want permission. That's a big part of it. I don't want to be handed the keys after enough begging and scratching at the castle gate that my fingers can no longer hold the ring they're on. I don't respect those who presume to hold the power. I don't want what they're offering. I don't want the “culture.” And, increasingly, the only reason I want the money is so I can pay the bills many years in advance, and go back to sleep until I'm thrust out of bed excited by the idea that was able to make me do so. I don't need to keep blowing the amounts of money I've been on food. I don't need an array of new tools and half-assed construction experiments. I could choke down my bathroom aesthetic for years. Do I work another 6 months and let that translate into 5 years of security?

I suppose I'm just frustrated that even when you're no longer allowing that frustration to lie within you and your clenched jaw, it's still a basic kind of existential frustration flitting about. I still have to go to work tomorrow. I'd still have to do that 6 months. Everything I learned how to do that registered as worthwhile or “smart” growing up has translated into precisely the ability to suffer not doing those things in my own time and indefinitely. Does anyone I work with care about my ability to read and make arguments? Is my ability to play guitar poorly yet better than anyone else you know at the top of their thoughts about me? Care to discuss all the TV I know you're watching as well?

It's just gross. It's gross and arbitrary but for the randomly stipulated rules I'm starting to preempt in making sure you feel the unnecessary painful consequences of them a little more severely. I still need something a little more tangible to look forward to than the prospect of fun-enough ways of continuing to bide my time. Shit, that could be the theme of the title of my book: “In Waiting” “Biding Time” “6 More Months” “Just Around The Corner” “When We Flirted Over Dreams” “Staging 101.”