[827] Thanky, Gimme

One of the chief complaints my mom had about us as children was that we were spoiled. (Because we raised ourselves and bought fancy things? #projecting) I forget the circumstances, but one time when we had pissed her off, in a rage, she demanded that from that day forward we were going to have to declare something we were thankful for every day. My stomach immediately sunk. I didn’t really understand the task, and in the same sort of way that you know you’re going to fail a test in school, I had no idea how I was going to figure out a way to answer every day with something that wasn’t going to get me beaten. Luckily, it was bluster, and after the night of our egregious offense, she forgot or didn’t bother with pressing our duty the next day. On this day literally named for thanks, I offer my most visceral memory associated with the term.

Older, wiser, it’s a lot easier to conceive of “thankfulness.” I could parse it down to incredibly specific and small things or sweeping conceptions I enjoy working with. I know what it’s like to experience the highs and lows, and I know the real work that goes into giving you the kind of grounding to realize the infinite amount of pieces that go into you being able to function in the world. My fingers work in my healthy-ish body as I type this on my one of several computer devices. I’m full of food, and just beyond those walls are people who would look out for me in shitty situations. I have an important job which affords me the opportunity to dream and plan as though I’m going to live until tomorrow and the next several years. I have redundancies and failsafes and insurance. I have leisure and an opinion about things that suggest a certain class. I’ve had access to inspiring ideas that provoke my creative impulse.

My intensity regarding what I’m thankful for has certainly dampened. I recall listening to Cassadee Pope say how different jumping up and down at 30 is from when they were doing it on tour at 21. “Life” as a holistic concept is a conservative force. It’s not asking you to build a shelter anymore grand than nabs you a mate. It’s not begging you to feed the homeless, make millions, or respect the balance of your microbiome. The haphazard organization of your social and emotional life, if not almost perfectly arbitrary, is a blueprint shaped by a bygone era and fundamental gamble mitigated only in conscious decision. You can get fat, do what you’re told, and use normative language and “win.”

My family, for all of its petty in-fighting, telegraphs that conservative pulse. We manage to throw together an array of food, talk of sports, movies, and the detailed descriptions of Chicago travel directions to rival an SNL skit. Through a baseline of “up, work, home, TV, bed” trips get taken, bills stay paid, and no one seriously believes we won’t be able to manage some way, somehow. The network that is my family has its own baseline and expectation I think most middle-class and above families do. You can waste as many years and words in hatred in the “in-between,” as long as if shit gets real you rush to the chance to reclaim your place and purpose while you build ever-more resentment that you had to be bothered. (One shudders to think what my family world would look like if my dad and step-mom hadn’t been my grandma’s primary caregivers.)

I find that as long as I don’t expect things from my family, I can get along well enough like I would at any table of “regular folk.” At this point, “thankful” becomes a complicated subject. I can’t say I’ve ever had too strong a conception of what family was supposed to mean, but if I were to guess, trust would be a kind of ground-floor component. Can I trust them? Here I return to an answer that I use for most people I entertain in life. I trust them to “be who they are.” This is a life-affirming respect when you conceive of someone as an individual. On the other end, it’s a forlorn shug you might offer about a humping dog who’s gotta hump. They might be significantly better than nothing in a proper crisis, but in that conservative tradition, they’re not going to partner with you to head-off said crisis.

I try my best to reduce this sentiment to a dispositional more than personal grievance. My concept of what I have empowers and enables me to want to explore and grow. Because I’m thankful for how the knowledge of how hard it can be, there’s a fair degree of things I can “suck up” that I get a series of confused and pitying looks from others when I speak about. (Namely my living conditions.) I understand the rule of “have more space, you’ll fill it up” and “have more money, the more you’ll spend” so I look for ways to utilize the space I occupy and resources I acquire that will build the intangible. What does it mean to argue against a culture so many are perfectly contented to? What does it mean to try and mold the abstract that is thought into future taken-for-granted gains? It means you’re perpetually alone and very confusing to all the people who wonder why you’re not happy to have a family, movies, and ability to describe the layout of a major city street by street. We’ve survived fascism much worse than Trump, they’ll say.

I understand conservatism in a way I don’t respect. It’s the thing already there independent of examination. No matter how far and away a “lefist” or hippie you might be, you’ll respect and desperately require the organization and oversight in clean water and traffic laws. The same can be said about a great many things. The task is to maintain a respect for what it takes to keep that basic structure in place and then take on further responsibility to shape higher orders of organization. If you’re fat and happy, you should consider doing something more to slim down and find something worthy of worrying about.

That’s my insufferable persistent push and ask. For the countless times I’ve been told something positive or affirming about me, what can that truly amount to if I were playing this life game “correctly?” What does it mean if people like me, presumably that cohort in college I was all crazy about, organized around those higher order principles? What if you had people who signed on to addressing the foreseeable crisis in a way the world at-large can barely conceive of or recognize when they arise? Is it a job for the Illuminati, the politicians, or pseudo-benevolent technocrats and billionaires? For the amount of times I raise the prospect to my incredibly small circle of influence, I’m lucky to find 1 in 100 that will entertain the conversation, let alone consider the plan of action. I’ve watched for years while we wait for the next viral star to save us or placate with eyebleach and feel-good videos.

To be sure, there are many organizations trying *something* to “fix things.” None of this is to pretend that I have the sole, or even that great of an understanding or grasp, of how *everything* should run or be organized. But I can retain the awareness for what’s missing. I can crave a spirit of accountability and engagement I can’t find. I can watch as people avert their eyes when presented the opportunity to bet more for a reward that can’t exist without sufficient sacrifice. I can watch people emptily envy me when I profess how far in advance I seek to pay my bills or how I manage to see and do things “on a social worker’s budget,” so ill-conceived. There is no age I believe I’m supposed to get to where all the bluster I’ve exhibited in blogs is supposed to reduce to barely cooling my brow as I waste away on a beach cliche.

So how thankful are you? Is it enough to affirm and strive for more than your place at a familiar table? Is it enough to see what every day can really bring and worth suffering the feeling for what more you think you could do? Are you thankful that you have the mind and body that can do a shocking amount relative to the conservative mean or next to someone missing one or a dozen of your gifts? I didn’t need to get a job where I routinely surround myself with poor people to recognize it in myself. I didn’t need to hear the tired stories and excuses of those who always have someone else to blame. My mom dropped the “thankful” game because she wasn’t, and still isn’t, accountable. My family bites off its nose to spite its face because it can’t focus or organize around not just what’s gone so well, but what could be with goodwill and thanks for the memories. I hope to emulate or design a way of living where every ounce of thanks you can squeeze from yourself translates into the greater cultural immune system, because mine’s operating in a fashion so many more deserve as well.

[826] No Thyself

If you take people out of a structure, they float. If the structure isn't built into their being, attempts to impose structure are going to overwhelmingly fail. Whether we agree with broad-stroke attempts to define and understand the world at-large or not, there are lines on the road, rules codified, and norms that evolve to meet the psycho-social environment. The merit of structure is undeniable. The predictability, imperfect as it may be, is invaluable. I want to know that most of the time the cars are staying on their side of the road.

When do we ask ourselves how much structure is necessary? When do we reflect on what the structure is doing to our ability to float away from something harmful? I find myself both enhanced and handicapped by norms and rules. I severely dislike being late, even if nearly no one shares the same courtesy or anxiety. I couldn't stand school, and still didn't routinely skip class. I'm going to be pressing my luck with my awakeness and desire to contribute meaningfully to my workday, but I'm pretty clearly still intending to make it there.

I'd rather be floating. I've discovered 100 playlists tonight I want to sit here and listen to. I've been doing really well getting through all of my shows, and would like a clean slate to start something new tomorrow. I keep eye-balling a couple books that I need to finish. I was drilling myself to try and identify frets on my guitar by note. Instead, I have to pause, and reset, and shift into “the grind,” so-named for it's ability to wear you down in existential spite.

I was watching Atypical, and the kids are debating whether college was the right kind of course for one of them. I've always been intrigued by people who knew early college wasn't for them. I didn't know I had any other option. School was easy, college was a joke, and ten years later I manage to use my degree for an incidental job after I exhausted my naive resolve to power through alone on my quest to conquer a self-righteous sovereign archetype. I mean, that game is still running, but there's rules I still feel obliged to follow after hitting 30 that I didn't feel I had to follow so hard in my 20s.
Do I still want to break those rules? Absolutely. I'm in a very shoddy approximation of what “structure” and “safety” we're supposed to be bringing to families in crisis. There is no lateral thought. There is no stark-naked facing of the practical truth to how we behave. I didn't know the true extent of the problem in trying to be the only adult in the room. It doesn't matter the field, you have people operating under the cover of that structure, not rocking the boat, come more often hell than any amount of water to put out the fires.

The worst part of lived-experience is that it's the same story. They don't want the numbers. They won't take responsibility. They won't define literally anything, ever. When you try, you get punked. When you press the person in power, they lash out and, predictably, attempt to undermine your effort. They ignore how their failures translate into the failures of those around them. I forgot just how much of my drive to do things my way or by myself was predicated on the horrible spirit of those I encounter. The ones who give up and make excuses. The ones who've packed their lives with so many distractions and things that make them hateful and wretched that nothing remotely possible and uplifting really gets through.

The world of constant justification is the one we occupy. It's the one in fantastic display with the fascist governments that can do no wrong. It's why you're meming instead of writing. It's why you'll suffer in silence, alone, or with your incidental partner, and share the photogenic times. I've found myself prompted to offer reasons I'm not invested in for how things are or aren't moving because I don't feel like the one moving them. That's a crack, and it needs filled. I run headfirst into things and put back together what I've cracked open with my skull.

I meet enough people with some form of “fatal flaw.” They have good or creative ideas, but can't be bothered to organize or promote them. They have a degree of politeness and sociability, but they can't be honest about their responsibility to extend that into situations that make them uncomfortable. They have a personality and enthusiasm, but overwork themselves or pack their schedules so they can't be forced to sit and converse about why they're stuck or feeling helpless. People want to be enabled, and the world provides a dozen reasons a day to keep on with bad habits and bullshit words.

The reason I remain different is my willingness and drive to continue to the end. It's the moment to moment engagement with one or all of the things I say I wish to be engaged in. I suffer from too much and not enough time, not too many words explaining away my ability to contribute. I also subject myself to over-arching rules like “pay off all debt” before I engage in my flights of fancy speculation and business games. How boring you look and feel when you're waiting for 2 months to feel like you're allowed to decorate your bathroom or till soil. How useless you feel when the weather is right for tree-digging, but the weekend becomes the most precious thing as you attempt to peel your exhausted soul away from the work drama.

I still believe there's an insane amount of time that goes unaccounted for. I think part of my ability to continue to believe in myself is knowing things can change in an instant. I say that a lot, because it's true. You stumble into something that grows, and suddenly you've got cash or a connection under which the world opens up. My plot to be able to actually use my paychecks is still playing out. I can get into a lot of fun or trouble very quickly with $1000 and nothing else on my mind. I haven't given up on that singular premise for years, and it's afforded me this breathing room. I feel like I've watched people give up on their fundamental place and drive a long time ago, and I'm swamped by people who've maybe never had one.

[825] Snow Dei

It's been interesting, at least to me, to watch myself over the last few...minutes? Years? So much a return to the contrived. I'm plugged in. I'm day-by-day with the same resolve that got through school, drives me on my commute, and does the math to put his aberrant behavior aside just long enough.

It's a wonder how I manage to account for that aberrant behavior, if I manage at all. I legitimately didn't believe in my ability to correct for my language before I started real-world jobs. I didn't have the impulse control to not suffer my idealism with perpetual headaches and impassioned pleas to be listened to for all of the easily-fixable problems I could identify. I think I just started to really feel how actually simple things were. Or, better stated, simple for those who've worked to pursue the embodiment of timeless ideals and cliches.

Take something like responsibility. What does it really mean? I think, on balance, the world is random. There's as strong a case to be made for never and nothing responsibility as there is for my posture about being “responsible for everything.” Is it either? Is it both? What manifests is your genuine belief in either. You find yourself at the whims of fate, or you start dictating how you're going to navigate what's happening around you. That's perhaps the wisdom or spell of consciousness and why I don't feel bad killing bugs. You can find yourself flying blindly into a light, but, honey, you're human. I expect you to do better.

I had some pretty dope lines about forgiveness I don't know that I'll be able to reproduce. Is forgiveness possible? I think the fact that we've pawned the responsibility for it onto magic sky daddies suggest “no.” Without them, that leaves it to us to forgive. That means we have to understand our darkness. That means we have to actually feel good about things we actually never believe we'll feel good about. Does that betray your consciousness? Is it a bitten thumb in the face of existence? What if I “got over” Trump or my ideas about fascism? Without condoning, what if I discovered them as a continuum of human experience? What if I considered them as a wave, just up or down, subject to the gravity in which I could exert upon them? More manageable? Accessible as a physics issue, not an infinitely unknowable series of probabilistic human machinations?

I don't know if I forgive myself more than I try to understand myself. I think when I talk about my “self-destructive impulse” I'm speaking to a kind of ignorance more than a perpetual desire to die or experience pain. Maybe I don't know how to cope. Maybe I never really want to give myself the kind of credit my experience suggests. I find myself in a kind of ever-spiraling humble-brag about what it is I think I can accomplish or have already. I'm proud of myself. I can't stand what I get by way of other peoples' opinions or lack-thereof contributions. That has an insane amount of power I always want checked. Who's going to do so?

I've gotten so insanely comfortable. I'm sitting here at 1am, finishing off my Blue Moons, maybe going to get 3 or so hours of sleep, before I limp my way back to my cushy job dancing around poor and desperate people. Why do I deserve that? Why am I so comfortable, that I can recognize the degree of my regal existence well-before I actually start getting to the financial or decision-making place that will start shifting the world? Did I do the work of humility? Did I eschew the kind of ignorant pride I see on the face of business-school kids? Have I somehow atoned for all of the horrible thoughts or actions I've engaged in with reckless abandon for how we're all connected and what it would mean for the world at large? Do I, in my bones, even believe that high-minded jibber jabber?

What I know is that I've watched most of the people I've been closest to get as far away as impracticality calls for. I know that my supports are good for a good deal, but their heart isn't in the same place. I know that I've been thinking for a while about a line from Bill Maher about, paraphrasing, “maybe some people in your life were just meant to be there for a moment, and you're not supposed to be attached forever.” I don't think I need to facebook stalk everyone I've ever known, but I have an incredibly hard time dismissing the influence I saw you bring to the culture. The “random” text or invitation you get months or years from now is going to have everything to do with that sentiment.

It's the moment I want to sit back and just enjoy, just revel, just laugh, or just stare at what I've done that I realize I'll always want more. I want the world. I want what's next. I want to perform. I want to exhibit. I want to feel my fingers freeze as I cope with my impulse to address some longstanding need that presented itself without warning, so now here we are in some random-ass place and have to deal. (Imagine, figuring a way to transport a large tool in an ill-equipped car – a frequent occurrence for me.) Every span of time I think is “forever” leaves me feeling about for the next lever to pull after the bill gets paid or the months instantaneously blink by. These words, like everything I've ever said, exist now, and forever, and pick to operate in that vein of existence about what's possible verses what's happening.

Like I've said, mildly drunk me is the best me. I draw a lot of inspiration from that guy, and all of my deeply buried lovey-dovey feelings I've learned to repress come out as a befuddling diatribe talking about how great it's all going to be. Get on my level.

[824] Angel Dust

Why do we play some games and not others? My grandma and I used to play a lot of card games. According to her, I was really good at either Rummy or Canasta, but until she told me this was the case, I didn't remember ever playing either. Keep in mind, I might've been 7 or so at the time. Apparently, she taught me how to play, I wiped the floor with her, and then we paused playing for long enough for me to not even remember doing so. With cards, I played because my grandma was a boss and fun to be around given that she genuinely wanted the company of her family. Her including me in card games carried over into when I got older and would proceed to clean up in playing Rummikub with her and her friends.

The familiarity of a game is what I find most potent. It's one thing to have fun, another to consider the competitive angles. But once you know a game, unless you're me as a child, you know it. A thousand protests I can hear in the distance play familiar games with their own versions of the rules or recall memories fighting with family members as someone stumbles through a read from the rule book. You don't need to know hidden banker rules to know how to play Monopoly, and you never have to learn about bluffing or blinds to play poker. You know how they basically operate, and you can carry on in a safe and smart-enough way.

The amount of times I've referred to life as a game is high. The rules are chosen by each individual, and it's played across levels of familiarity and competence. If you choose to pull out of the game, different rules are enforced, and any remote fun or competition is subsumed by all-too-real consequences. The more unfamiliar you are with those consequences, the less the game feels like it can be played with confidence or competence. I think, whether you consider it an over-arching theme in how to approach your life or not, you'd be foolish to not believe there are an endless array of people who don't want you to win.

Win what? Their game or yours? Win how? Monetarily? In notoriety? Winning and losing are ideas before they're meted out as disappointment or punishments. First, you have to lose your mind. You have to lose the conception of yourself as someone who can win, regardless of what, and well before you have the words or vision for what that win looks like. You have to be plunged into the depths of failure and still listen for what's said next. You have to see the inhumanity in so many ideas and land on the side of struggling to push through a conception worthy of life.

My game has remained the same in a lot of ways. I still want to enable people. I still want all of my time to do whatever with. I still want to retain my voice, especially in spite. I want my world to be filled with my people, and I want to see what we create.

My game has changed in a few key ways. I'm not willing to hate and exhaust myself along the road. I'm not willing to work for those who won't work for themselves. I'm not going to look for more reasons than I naturally conceive of to doubt what I'm doing. Do you know who cares? No one. Pretend you're Chang hearing about your problem. Who's Chang? Exactly, and he doesn't know you either. There is no secret drama or meaning behind your struggle. Pick it, or don't, but leave the excess energy and Chang alone.

I like playing games that make examples. I've played the “build a house” game for a while now. School when I was younger was a “smart kid” game. Just like cards, there's familiar patterns of behavior you can play safe and intelligently enough to get to the desired outcome. College was the “party game.” Drug studies were considered an “efficiency game.” I'm calling my time at DCS a “pragmatic punishing perspective game.” I like to prove a point, an almost always petty one, that yes, I can. I can switch and play your game, or amp back up mine, or do any number of things because I'm able and/or going to win.

This can get you into trouble. This indirect, yet somehow exacting sensibility is to be embodied. If you've ever had a body, you know it doesn't always do what you point and click on it to do. Or, it does, but by electing to play on a different level than you were planning. This sounds abstract and weird because it is. Maybe you adopt habits that help you maintain a relationship. Maybe you blackout trauma and unduly worship to keep your head straight. Maybe it's not an affirmation to conceive of yourself as the only one playing or capable of winning on the kind of board you've build for yourself.

Win? Win your own game? Big deal! Who gives a shit about your game with all of the xyz and blah-diddly-blah in the world? Also, sucker, I've got a game too, and you're not even Chang to me.

It can be easy to forget the wins. The struggle, once overcome, is the romance and nostalgia. Pick a battle too big, you may give up or die trying. Pick an opponent not in your league, you won't even be able to understand the directions of their playbook. I make a lot of predictions and comments about who I think people are or where they're at in life. Usually they pretty much tell me how it's going to be. They don't recognize the game they're playing, I don't actually have super powers.

I don't know who I am if I don't exist in service to the larger and longer game, the people I consider mine, and the ideas I've never let go of. It's not that I need some desperate out-of-reach thing to always exist relative to. It's that I feel empowered when I entertain the implication of running those new games. What happens with the right soup of people? Where does my better organized and engaging website take politics? What springs forth from my stabs at paycheck-affordable business ideas? I say things like this often because they are the things that need to win. They need to beat cynicism and comfort. They need to beat dejected c'est le vie. They need to beat you.

I remember never believing, until it happened, being able to get this far. I'm again, typing from my electrified, air conditioned, outright-owned home on my big screens, under a blanket in a recliner. Each piece of this puzzle a little side-quest adventure. I'm doing a solid run this round, on this level, against my worse conceptions of myself. I'm even finding new people to play with and join their games. And, as always, I'm 2 or 4 months away from the kind of tepid “security” that everyone trying to play for 100+ years dreams of; a playground to shape per the directive of the imagination. I mean, even more, that is, as it's so easy to forget the struggle once it's overcome.