[889] Nothing More

I suspect a mess.

One of the things I struggle most with is giving people credit. That's not to say I can't see what they're worth. I simply see people as “only” worth a series of superficial things that pass for what a lot of modern day culture consists of. Maybe you're smart, so you stay in school and get advanced degrees. But you'll subject yourself to a kind of financial or emotional ruin because “smart” only got you so far. Maybe you're really good at showing up or encouraging others, but you let your fear or ambivalence keep you from reaching out when you need help or contributing in service to a deeper ideal. Maybe you forgive everyone besides yourself.

A frequent topic of conversation between Allie and me is about the environments we're cultivated in and cultivating. You can take something as simple as a grocery store to think about everything implicated and matter-of-fact that goes into it. You don't have to pick fruit, cut vegetables, come up with a way to keep things cold, build a cart, or expect a fight to break out about when you're next to check-out. Food costs money, right? It grows everywhere, but you don't go to the store without money or the intention to steal. Food you don't eat goes in the trash, right? There's a large amount of people who wouldn't dream of composting or thinking of things in a cyclical manner. You go to the store, you buy food, you throw away the waste.

Every area of our life has these in-built expectations or hesitations whether we are paying attention to them or not. What's an online conversation? Does it even exist? Not even among friends! It's a fight by default. You're hearing in your mind an unwanted challenge, you don't have the wherewithal to “debate,” and you are situated in a place that cannot understand. It's what's expected and beaten into you. You're fighting, you can't hear or see what's said, and no one is attempting to understand. This whole conversation happens with yourself before you ask, “Why bother?” before posting anyway. If it's not a meme, emoji, or pleasantry, it's an off-limits way to engage.

I have my fair share of pissing matches with people online. It doesn't matter if I'm slinging hateful words or asking sincere questions, across the board my act to respond to someone's voice is treated as hostile, not an invitation. I think this is partly a consequence of the internet algorithms who assure us the world can be cultivated for us to see only what we want. I think this is a display of humanity's basic insecurity of discovering just how fraught with problems and complications their thinking can be. God forbid they be shown to be wrong, and in front of so many people!

Then you devolve into the condescension, the dismissing the very notion of “debate,” inevitably someone's mistyped word or phrasing gets latched onto, and the fight over the last miserable word until the post gets deleted or locked ensues. It's familiar, it's ridiculous, and no one has seen fit to study the consequences of it or how to get out of it.

I still try. I look for the analogy. I've got print-outs on toddlers who destroy houses and act like they're the boss. What is a parent supposed to do? Reset to a baseline expectation. This is akin to me insisting you actually quote me before claiming to disagree with something I've said. I don't trust your contrarian impulse, it's the default one offered to us by our internet training. If someone wants to pull their cord and recite cliché after cliché, return them to the question they've ignored. Don't give them more words to destroy.

What's worse than arguing with idiots, if it isn't something of a not-so-scientific study and exercise for you, is when your “friends” don't give you credit. I think I go above and beyond to share the most clear, researched, or affecting things that I read. They're almost never shared. I can say either people aren't or don't care to read. I can say they just don't have time. I can say they don't think it's actually as good or informative as I do. I can say they don't believe their crowds care or deserve to see it. I can say anything, because I don't know anything. There's no real feedback besides the handful of people I know pretty regularly read. The most important voices, that aren't even mine lol, are not breaking through to networks I'm not a part of. Whether what I post even makes it in front of a plurality of my friends, I don't know. I do know, it remains something of a personal secret whether anything was read or enjoyed.

If good information is treated as arbitrarily as cat videos, this medium that connects us all makes us feel hopeless and attacked by default, and even with regard to the people we seem to get along with or enjoy in real life don't tempt us to share or celebrate how they're orienting themselves to their thoughts, by what mechanism are we ever really sharing anything? What's the genuine connection? Who am I really hanging out with or talking to? How much credit can I give you, when the means by which we relate to each other 99% of the time, you appear to give me practically none?

I want to stress how large and impersonal I think this problem is. I know I read a disproportionate amount regardless. I know no one subscribed or signed up to hear from me or what I have to say. I know we've all got reasons we're too busy to be bothered with each other. None of that helps us pay attention to why or how we engage online. We can see thousands of sentiments about reducing screen time, the dangers to our children, and the ripping at the fabric of society, but we won't ask ourselves if maybe we should think out loud, deliberately, slowly, and try to piece together a collective framework for better understanding the world that isn't so miserable?

I've said it a lot how much I wish I had a blog a week from each one of my friends to read. No one wants to share, but I don't advocate for writing just because I've done it a lot. I think it's vital. I think we need to fight back against the many default forces that suggest our spaces and resources can only be used in specific and harmful ways. You have options of how to relate to me, to each other, this medium, and the world at large. How many people could live in an abandoned Wal-Mart? How much dust could you blow in the face of your enemies after grinding down its concrete walls? Who would bother or think to ask such a weird thing? Someone choosing to be just a little more creative and motivated in service to what's possible.

For as meaningless as the word “balance” has seemed to become today, perhaps we can move on to “tempering.” You're perhaps in balance at all times, physics-wise. But is your environment tempered by better choices about where your energy is directed? Can you simply read and respond to something? Can you share because you need to even and especially when you don't want to? There's nothing more or less dramatic going on nor exercise in patience and humility to practice.

[888] Know Mother Best

 

Know Mother Best

12/22/2020

This is gonna get weird.

“Violence” has many seemingly at-odds with each other definitions. I have a problem with this.

The first definition from Merriam-Webster says: a. the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy b. an instance of violent treatment or procedure.

This one makes sense to me. This is how I generally understand when I'm feeling violent or when I describe the kind of violence perpetrated towards me.

If you skip to number 4 on Merriam-Webster, you get: undue alteration (as of wording or sense in editing a text.)

What? It's violent to misrepresent text? This feels like the familiar refrain of the modern “culture wars.” I know the last time I touched a “sensitive” topic like trans issues, I certainly felt like my words were being violently ignored, reconfigured, or used to express sentiments that were the exact opposite of my views.

The degree of violence perpetrated in “mislabeling” people or in not reading the sheer depth of in-built racism into every interaction is insisted upon a lot lately. Don't want to give up saying Ellen Page even about her earlier works? Violent. Don't want to too seriously entertain a body dysmorphic teenager's appeal to transition? Egregious violence. Think the Civil War had other factors in conjunction with slavery? You're working hard to start lynching again, aren't you!?

I was a psychology major. If there is ever a time to learn how “soft” the study of human behavior is, it's during a series of classes where it's considered a revelation that we're composed of our bio-psycho-social environments. I'm also a person who was unfairly beaten a fair amount as a child. While that sucked, what was considerably worse was the emotional violence of my mother who left me anxious, vicious, and sociopathically cold in my attempts to cope.

I respect both kinds of violence. I still have trouble controlling anxious impulses. I still dig at my skin. I don't flinch any time someone goes to brush their hair or adjust their glasses anymore, but that took a deliberate effort. The pain of not knowing how to figure out where I sat relative to my mom, myself, and the feedback I was getting from my environment is a huge contributor to my ongoing writing. Was I hurting myself? Was I responsible? Could anything he helped or fixed? I didn't know, so I tore myself apart.

To be sure, I think the vocal and angry wing of any activist trope works against themselves by not parsing how they're going to employ charges of “violence” and who the oppressors and oppressed really are. We're all someone's victim, and lashing out at anyone who can't pick apart the flavors of your recipe is no way to the top of the mountain.

My mom reached out to either my dad or brother or both. She's “curious” about what I've been up to the last 10 years I haven't spoken to her. Around this time back then, I went on a verbal texting tirade calling her different variations of “fat cunt” at random times throughout the day and night for several days. Our last phone conversation didn't go well, and the preceding 20 years weren't exactly great.

I shut that shit down.

I called my brother and asked him what precisely this inquiry was about. He had, at one point, also discontinued talking to her for a year or more. Back in the saddle, he's playing pleading middle-man to his hopes and dreams for some kind of resolution or forgiveness. I won't belabor my perception of his naivety, but picture nothing short of a waterfall of pitiful and empty sentiments. Takeaway comments from him include, “I don't believe we were abused,” and “I can say one thing, I know she loved us.” Those were, of course, sandwiched between in-depth relays of the *serious discussions* he's had with her about every single person in her life she's chased away and his agreement that she is a total “head-fuck.”

I don't place my hand on a stove, nor in a fire, nor let boiling water run over.

I don't negotiate with fire. I don't empathize with fire. I don't make excuses for fire. Fire is ambivalent in burning down my house or cooking my food. Fire doesn't love, and if you deliberately burn someone, you're abusing them. When I explained that I've literally removed children from homes for the kinds of things enacted on us, my brother didn't buy it. He recalled *knowing* he would not have responded to anything but spanking at certain points in his life.

There's little doubt in my mind that my mom is severely sick. Whatever confluence of forces molded her, she did not, cannot, control. She can mouth all of the words of “love” or “family” she wants, but they exist in her universe her way. This is the nature of severe mental illness. Sometimes it's banal and is just weird or annoying. Sometimes it's predatory.

I recognize the difference because I've taken the time to extrapolate the kind of person she has molded me into. Unrestrained and unrepentant, I'm a monster. We all would be. I struggle to believe as many people straddle that line as precariously as I do, but who knows.

But let's extrapolate further and pull back for a broader view. What is fascism?

MW: a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy...[].

Kids have a fascist reflex. It's mine! No! Their way or the highway. The more you give in, the more tyrannical and entitled they become. Adults? They get to play dress-up and regarded with due respects for their “republican values” or “free market ideals.” You see, it's merely “conservative” to endorse racism, xenophobia, and deny the implications of math and science. You're not an ignorant child, mentally unwell, or as dangerous and ambivalent to what you're burning down as fire.

If you're lucky enough to be someone who isn't walking around with a gaping wound, congratulations. Mine is my mother. I have a solid-enough situation, plans, generally good days, and increasing degrees of comfort if not license to start nipping at the larger battles I wish to fight. Bring her into the mix? I'm tempted to threaten all of that. It's not that I don't understand her, what I've become as a result, or how to take responsibility for who I am going forward. It's that I understand too much. I know just how bottomless the hole for destruction and consumption goes.

What do I want someone to take away from my experience? What's the wisdom here? The same shit I echo in nearly everything I write. Tell the truth, horrifying as it may be. React with actual violence if necessary when the lies used to build the environment we're raising ourselves in is suicidal and insatiable. Know the enemy. Is it my mom? Or is it the pathetic excuses and desperation offered by my brother? Is it the ignorant advocate for reconciling what never could or should be attempted?

It's theoretically easy enough for me to make an argument for self-preservation and hype up a kind of lie about how I just couldn't control myself nor ever concede I had a single good day while in her care. I could borrow from some “it's just about how you orient yourself!” self-help book and focus on the positives. I could use all of my training and perspective regarding trauma to put up the facade that we're actually all in this together, and things can be okay, and we're all “adults,” and I could stop typing with one hand as the other goes to ensure I really sell the gagging. I'm not going to dress up for my day at the gallows, especially when it will lend itself to you never facing nor dealing with how fucked and complex of a monster it is you have to navigate.

When my worst instincts start kicking in, I work to fit them in with the rest of me. When I'm my most violent or dejected or confused, I write. Maybe I screamed at an asshole on the highway before I got to writing, but they couldn't hear me. I choose to do better than the malignant programming. I choose to look closer, contextualize, and expound. I recognize the bold, ignorant, angry, and violent fascist in me. I work and advocate and create what I need to see to keep him at bay. If you're not doing the same with yourself, you're at the mercy of people like my mom. You're riding the whims of 74 million people willing to lick the naked ass of their demons and insist it tastes like candy.

At least, now, I can write a calm blog about it. I can conjure a few choice insults on my mind-wandering drives, but I'm not experiencing month-long headaches and misting over lost stuffed comrades. You shouldn't lazily throw around “violence” as a catch-all for your hurt feelings or society's annoyance or indifference. I know violence. I crave violence. I even think we desperately need a large dose of genuinely righteous violence against the forces in power. But we're still apologizing on the perpetrator's behalf. We're still shivering and afraid, too ideologically possessed by our victimhood to see ourselves in our punishers.

Maybe the worst of us aren't making the choice and can't control themselves. You shouldn't be saying the same thing about yourself. I certainly can't. How much power do you think that affords me? Should we test my capacity for violence? No, so don't play with fire, and don't talk to my mother.

[887] Spring Time

Spring Time 12/20/2020 I've always been a night owl. I can remember bringing a flashlight with me to bed, and staying up reading books under the covers, perfectly convinced my parents had no idea. I remember the old gray TV I was allowed to have in my room, scooting my bed next to it so I could reach the buttons, as I fell asleep to it playing inches from my face. I had to learn how to use the sleep timer because we didn't have our electric company confirming that a running TV results in a negligible impact on your overall bill. When I was in high school, I worked at a movie theater, regularly not getting off of work until 10 or 11 PM, then I would stay out with my friends, roaming parking lots and Steak N Shakes. I was always down for the after after party in college, and when I had nothing to do but drug studies and sleep, I preferred to sleep from 5 to 11 AM. 

 I read about different people's sleep cycles, and how “not being a morning person” is as biologically encoded as those who are bafflingly able to run a marathon from their first steps off the bed. I still feel it now. Some days I'll start a project when I get off work, find a groove, and I don't want to stop, getting more energy as the night carries on. Knowing that the world immediately around me is still grants me a license and intentionality I don't find that often during the day.

 I've spent a good portion of my life on the “normal” schedule, whether the habits were instilled by school or day jobs. I feel the difference palpably between going to sleep and waking up at regular times, and letting my in-built nature to stay up remain ambivalent of the time or consequences. It's a hard contrast which has provoked this blog. I'm tired, tight, and working back the dread of my day. Two days ago I stayed up in spite of myself and ate a bunch of sugar. I'm still “suffering” that series of decisions now, as well as the anxiety over paperwork I woke up at 2 AM to mostly complete. 

Despite the rhythm or ease with which I might be able to emulate the mold of a day-walker, it's not me. I can practice it every day, and one loose afternoon I can affirm what I'd rather, what I *need* in order to feel normal, consequences be dammed. I'm 32. I'm never going to be fundamentally someone who wakes up early, goes to bed early, and finds peace. 

What does this kind of understanding of myself afford me? I know what kind of jobs or management I'm going to be able to entertain or for about how long. I know when an ideal I migh've held can no longer conjure up the zeal or indignation required to push it over a cliff. I know how vitally important it is to pay attention when something doesn't fit and to record how often you seem to be experiencing the same problem. I still procrastinate on paperwork. I'm still not bought-in. I still find no sense of value or worth in focusing and drilling down to get it done. I may put off cleaning a cat box, but it doesn't fill me with hopelessness and shame when I finally get to it. 

I'm extremely thankful I've been able to pull off what I have in regard to my life thus far. My timelines are accelerating. My bills, even when they suggest a “major” expense, are embarrassingly indulgent. I get to have these daily crises of confidence and faith in how I make my money knowing that they are more and more a choice of luxury than at the behest of my overlord. To borrow an idea from a book on happiness I'm reading, I'm not “hungry” that any one thing I buy or business I create is going to enable more happiness, but I am hungry to stop feeling obligated to a certain kind of engagement and expense. I don't think my sense of what's practical has caused me more harm than good, but its limitations feel altogether strangling when your eyes are fixed on what's beyond the horizon.

[886] Crying Shame

I'm thinking about the change that happens when you finally become desperate or miserable enough and how that fits with the idea that I might be "negative" or someone generally worth silencing. Ultimately, you force open a door that has been rusted shut. That's what writing first was to me. I had immature and insecure ideas about writing a "diary." I was under an immense amount of stress and confusion which finally overrode my ignorant judgements and assumptions about what I needed to do.

I'm finding the simple nature of this idea incredible. So much so I feel it could be in a cheesy infomercial about how easy it is to use. It's a map or tool that might require practice in how to use it, but the fundamentals are accessible to nearly anyone.

We divorce our understanding of things the less we work to embody them. That's how easy things become hard. If I want to play an instrument like a "god" I need to get around to memorizing the fret board, a few more scales, and keep the metronome ticking in my ear. In a month the frustration I felt last night "sucking" will look like I've actually put in a few thousand hours over the years.

How we're told simple things matters. This was something I vehemently disagreed with for too long. I thought the "fact" of the matter was the only relevant thing. Whether I said it cussing or ambivalent to feelings, it was there, so deal with it. You couldn't, I wasn't really telling you anything you could understand, and I functionally made it harder to be understood by burying what I hoped to get across underneath my ego.

This is the intellectual and patient or conversational way that I believe the majority of people could relate to each other. I think the most dramatic discrepancies in views are as boring logistically and practically as anything else. Unfortunately, the "average" person doesn't have the patience to read a book, let alone write several unpacking their way of defining words and what motivates their feelings. And, who has the time? What then?

I think it's a game of containment at that point. Keep "the masses" at bay and busy. It's practical, but equally as cruel as me stomping through your belief system arguing science over religion.

I like that Jordan Peterson talks about how we're all tyrannical. I've described it as this unyielding deference to your feelings and insistence on the narrowest definitions of what's just or true. We're no more cruel a jailer than to ourselves. We'll let the knot in our shoulder grow. We'll believe the part of our conscience that's been drinking too much. We habituate and then treat the behavior as gospel.

I take for granted how I've managed to get to where I am in the world. It is described in no less than 900+ blogs. It's after self-imposed stressors both physically and mentally, although not nearly enough and not often of the right kind. In place of generalized doubt about the utility of something I might do, I start with acceptance of how impossible it is and how I'm going to do it anyway. It's a conviction born of practice and experience. I rely constantly on the living examples to testify for me when all my words are wrong.

It's an order of magnitude more terrifying to realize what you're capable of more than what you've done. What you've done is boxed in. What you're capable of is infinite. When you live that kind of experience or are able to show yourself why it is true, it feels fragile and volitle. It's a simple truth with humble ways to practice it, and it grants you the power to build or destroy the world.

How do you trust yourself? How do you manage *loving* as deeply as you could? What happens when you misplace infinite rage? How naive and lonely are you prepared to look and feel when it seems like you're the only one who still believes in something? The "choice" at some level is foisted upon you to live or die, and whatever else you obtain or observe once it's made is something to utilize or be plagued by in an ongoing way. Trauma begets trauma, or intentional practice conditions you to cope and work with anything.

We act like it is easier not to do things. It's the cultural norm. Don't expect the morally superior thing unless you're looking to get punished as a needy and greedy interloper. Don't account for things honestly because, cross your fingers, there's someone who is more equipped and more responsible than you who will take care of it.

I think we need a revolution that espouses radical responsibility. I think that revolution needs to come in easily accessible pre-packaged amounts of practice and pain. I just learned you can improve your health, demonstrably, with cold showers. I've previously discovered that the stress I've chosen has lead to me becoming a better example of the kind of person I want to be and others to imitate. A choice foisted upon you is not one whose lesson is easily discerned nor purpose dictated. We haven't shown people how to choose to get better. We don't speak their language. We don't speak our own well enough to believe that we have to.

[885] Stop The Tape

I get so worked up.

To be sure, this is not going to be walking back what I wrote earlier, but bringing a few more pieces to it.

There's an idea I entertain about all conversations being about the same thing. You may start out discussing your relationship with a friend, pivot to a restaurant you drive past together, and it reminds you of a memory growing up. Weren't you focused on the relationship conversation? Didn't it matter? What did that restaurant have to do with anything? Where did some distant memory figure it belonged?

Your brain is just processing, or not, the information. How it combines and condenses, or what's forgotten, is a product of too much to calculate. What can remain constant across ideas or memories is your awareness of your ideas and where they are moving. “You” can still observe that one provoked the other, or the infinite sea of a certain kind of emotion conjures seemingly otherwise disparate moments.

I'm aware that I can't be helped. That is, how my head works, how forcefully I speak, how angry I may seem, and all of the baggage that comes along with it is mine. You can't fix me. You can't make it better. If you have one idea, that you disagree, I'm left in the familiar realm of abyss screaming, life goes on, maybe I quit a job or crash a car. I suppose I can understand why it would feel unsatisfying to simply accept such dramatic or unconscionable outcomes so well in advance.

Part of the reason I can't be helped, especially in fervent blog form, I'm having a dozen conversations at once. I'm reminded of a series of injustices. I'm forming thoughts in real time that associate with a feeling. I'm searching for a word that triggers a mini diatribe as I recall for whom and what I generally save that word for. It's almost confusing intentionally. I don't have things figured out. Writing is me facing the severity of my feelings, so I can move on and eat dinner or laugh at the movie I put on.

I try to write one line at a time. I try to ensure that when you are predictably confused, exhausted, or bored with hearing me say the same things, maybe one line sticks. No matter how many books or articles I read, it's a few lines or paragraphs I ever repeat or consistently think of when I write. I know it won't be a line where I'm asking a question that can hardly be answered. I doubt it will be any calls to arms. I know you're the hero of your own story and modesty or privacy are fair enough reasons to never bother sharing, the problematic nature of social media aside.

I'm worried, but I'm selfishly worried too. I worry that I'm living in a failed state. As “big” or broad a topic as that may seem, it seems as real to me as turning a key and expecting my car to start. I struggle to know what the purpose and meaning of words or history are if I'm not supposed to be feeling credible ongoing fear about how to respond to that. I'm worried if you're not worried. I'm worried if you're more worried and feeling as helpless as I do. I'm worried if you're all of that and quiet, leaving me to carry on like a budding genuinely crazy person (ahem, person struggling with mental health).

I'm selfishly worried that for everything I've attempted to cut out of life, in spite, by investing, by sacrificing, by negotiating with my worst impressions and judgments of “the system,” I'm never going to really enjoy it. My mind is going to wonder about whether I should have been *more dramatic* or brave. I'm gong to miss people I've never met. I'm going to feel like I skirted by because of my convenient circumstances. I'm going to think about the walking dead waiting to invade. I don't want the stories that have been written by following rules or orders. I know death will take you whether you're full of pride or shit just as quickly.

I'm angry. I'm not the kind of angry that comes in the door, slams things down, and begs an aneurysm to pop. I'm the kind of angry that's been told to be a leader, with no one signing up for war. I'm the kind of angry who has watched systems he's been a part of degenerate one after another while he's tried to work incredibly hard mentally and physically to account. My mind races through the times I've offered to do more, organize better, save time, save money, or shuffled between “authority” who shit the bed so hard I can't find the words. I'm angry that I don't know what you believe in beyond the status quo.

Then I just feel dumb. Why get angry about what I don't know? Everyone's fighting their own battle, right? Why am I not comfortable it's a worthwhile and important one on their own terms? I'm not a man of faith, and if I were, I'd say faith is dead without acts. I think some people are doing their best, most aren't. Fair or not, that's my napkin calculation just based on the “professionals” I meet regarding the safeguarding of children AS A JOB. I don't need to inflate or become hyperbolic about what I've seen there. I don't struggle to praise and point out when it goes right either. Literally, by the numbers, we have reason to at least voice the worry.

So it goes with anything else you can count. What else don't I have to play make-believe about and get all worked up in my feelings over? 73 million. DCS going from 8-10 supervisors/managers to 3. Ireland having perpetually 7-10 families that aren't getting regular visits because the number of staff can't meet the demand. $50,000 contracts to keep families out of the system, but not enough money to pay case managers nor discussion about how poverty compounds their issues. 6 months the average tenure of someone at DCS or social work broadly (honestly, this could be an “all jobs” thing, but I haven't checked in a while). Pushing 300,000 dead. 0 states you can afford the average rent on minimum wage. What about compound interest on student loans and the number of years you've been enslaved for trying to learn?

How smug and self-satisfied should I feel about my next build on the land? Am I “fixing” anything but my gaze just past the dumpster fire? Should I continue to indulge my dreams or fantasies and write off everyone not choosing to be like me?...like so many entitled generations before me...like so many possessed by their first and last ideas?

It's big and small battles, all happening at once, all talked about in confusing or contradictory terms, and all particular to the humans, the individuals, involved. We can submit to our animal instincts or we can be human. We can't linger in-between as the forest burns.

I'm *trying* to say exactly what I've said in every line. I'm *trying* to say what I believe in by creating what I have on the land. I'm *trying* to say that I don't believe I know enough individuals fighting worthwhile battles. I know some, and I know what 73 million people would say or do to keep them in whatever polite, mature, safe conversational box they're in now. I'm saying that I am, in fact, *trying.* I'm failing, nauseatingly, unceasingly, to find things that align with my biggest and smallest conceptions of my being, but I'm also grinding my teeth and feeling sick to my stomach about what I feel all but forced to do for money, in service to people who think it's polite to offer me a chance to take off my mask.

[884] Stop The World

The temptation lately has been to list. I want to point to things that seem like they are part of a constant flow of “shit is fucked.” I want to denote them as such, and then point to how they could/should/might be provided a certain awareness or series of choices.

I'll once again qualify the “givens.” Things are cyclical, balanced, and ambivalent. Right and wrong exist when you get down to any level worth talking about. There are problems with every organization, structure, or manifestation of power, which does not make them evil, but their tyranny should not go ignored or denied. You choose to take responsibility, or you don't. We're not at the mercy of anything more than we are the story or spell we put ourselves under.

In what feels like record time, I've gotten a call from my regional manager about “something she's been made aware of.” I, unable to ignore my thoughts or sense of agency as I seemingly watch myself capitulate day in and out, sent an email explaining my perspective saying how I want the owners to pay everyone considerably more. There was more to it describing my perspective of work broadly and sense of history and numbers, but I stated plainly, as I do, a perceived injustice and why it lends itself to overwhelming hopelessness and futility.

Psychologically, I can't keep up the act. I've never been that good at it to begin with, but I'm not exaggerating when I say every single day I'm feeling pressured to speak out, rage, or just bring the fight for a conversation that doesn't center around deference or excuses. I feel like I see people in defeated states, often practically on the verge of tears, or indignantly lashing out over exceptionally petty things. That's it. I don't meet the ones who are angry. I don't meet that ones who have a plan for anything. I couldn't shake an opinion out of someone about their pay, nature of their work, or place in the world. Always, *always*, it's “moving right along.” It's a furled brow and needing to sit down for a talkin' to.

Don't I know the way things work?

THEY DON'T.

Not just yesterday, not ten years ago, today, we're dying in record numbers. We're 9-11ing every day. We're letting Kentucky get away with re-electing Mitch McConnell. We're, in no way, prepared to deal with the reality of 73 million Nazis stark raving mad about kids in cages, the tyranny of public health, and the right to be as racist and ignorant as their Dear Leader. WE ARE NOT HUMAN. We are a faceless mass of hysteria crashing into all levels of how society attempted to organize itself. We're exposing lie after lie, and it took how many YEARS before people were even willing to use the word “lie” with regard to Trump?

Truth matters. Right and wrong exist. It is not enough to get-by and exist as we are. If you can't wipe the fog from your eyes or clear your head on your own, the world is begging to kill you, today. I feel “radical” for wanting to make enough to live with a degree of comfort. It seems like a “dream” to not regret how I'm spending my time and in service to what. I feel obligated to “persuade” people they have an individual voice and responsibility to get angry, say something, and fucking DO. Join up and manifest. Do the math. Fight, bite, and scream!

If we're on the front line of this wave of fascism and stupidity, and we are, kill it! If we're trying to cling to some nominal sense of being and family we've clambered together in spite of the chaos, fucking defend it! If we shed a tear like some cliché commercial Native American over the environment dying and profit for profit's sake, throw yourself on the goddamn wheels and stop this fucking machine.

I'm violently indignant about your title, your presumption, or your placating held-harmless excuse engine. We're not all equal in blame. The people not paying you enough are. We're not all guilty. The people burning and cutting and polluting are. We're not all just at the mercy of greater forces, you, quiet co-conspirator are more guilty than me. You, person who feels the same anger and passion and swallows it need to stop listening at me and listen to your fucking self. You need to act!

I'm worried. I'm worried in the same way as when I crashed my car. I didn't consciously decide “I'm going to crash this bitch, I hate debt, it's not what I wanted, yada yada series of regrettable thoughts.” I drove it like it didn't matter, like I didn't matter, and like I wanted it gone. My deepest compulsions and beliefs manifest. If what's true of the world is the same that's true for me, nearly everything either wants me dead or is wholly ambivalent at the prospect. I need to find an outlet. I need to live in service to right and wrong, not self-righteous delusion, not accommodating coping, and not blind and deliberately ignorant posturing. I need an environment where right is right and wrong is wrong and if I work to be right I can expect to build and teach and create something worth protecting and fighting for.

I meant it when I said I needed to break things. Maybe it's “polite” society. Maybe it's my last barely clinging to the cliff idea about what's “pragmatic.” Maybe it's the “mature” governor that's toned down my behavior suspiciously at a time that coincides with what is an ongoing societal existential crisis. Like I'm running from the responsibility to be the Alex Jones-voiced character from Waking Life roaming the land with my megaphone. I live in a time that I can't invoke his crazy-ass horrible-person name without taking on his baggage before someone would bother to watch the fucking movie!

I think it's fitting that as I feel myself winding down on what else to say, Stop The World by Extreme is playing in my headphones.

If nothing else, I'm positive I will break a considerable amount before I get to me. Here's to hoping it's worth it and works out as well as my car crash did.

[883] Bubbling

I have had about a dozen titles for this float by over the last few days. I do not believe it would be overstating that I am coming from a place of calm, deliberateness, but still acutely aware “something” need be said. I'm “procrastinating,” which might be understood as me prioritizing writing this first. I'm actively mitigating my cold house, the heater out of commission, with a plug-in blanket. My coffee is delicious. A movie I've tried to watch 3 times is paused with pre-famous Bobby Cannavale explaining to Robin Williams why he needed a break from their relationship.

Again, I feel on the cusp of greatness. The last few days I've felt my initial enthusiasm for the Sirius XM Radio stations in my loaner car wane. At the same time, I got a loaner car when my truck shit the bed. I got it from someone I actively told was not my friend after we became desk mates at my last job. This friend is also repairing my truck while navigating too many clients and attempting to get through a doctoral program. He references his culture as the source of his impulse to help. My sense of greatness is bolstered by a relationship both shaped and unshaped.

I try to set conditions. The creation of my home is arguably the largest expression of that. Whatever winds may blow, they blow against my house, not my apartment complex. Whatever broad “business” idea I want to pursue, I won't pursue it with anyone less than an Allie or Hatsam.

I think you set up the conditions in your mind and behavior, and they manifest in incalculable ways. With my friend fixing the truck, I told him we wouldn't be friends unless he affected my bank account after he, incorrectly, thought he could get me a side job with the university. It was something of a running not-actually joke for a year and half until I called him about getting hired on where I work now. They paid me, so we're friends now, and then he went and did some shit like fix my truck, and I feel the kind of enthusiastic reciprocity burden to help him insulate and pour cement in his garage.

It has been my suspicion for quite some time that “sharing” or “reciprocity” have been beaten to death culturally. Things have reduced to “me and mine” at all times. Independent of that I can think of my best friend who, over the 20+ years we've known each other were anchored by exacting dollar amounts in where we sat with each other. It's very recent memories where the impulse to reference that $3 spent at McDonald's has come due isn't the first one. I don't know what else you might expect from a couple of psychopaths, but it was a system that worked.

The concepts of what bring us together don't become so opaque without the active assault and assertion for the current cultural narratives. You're not sharing with someone you need to “capitalize” on. You're not sharing your happy moments and achievements as much as marketing your brand or providing data points to get you photographing algorithm-predicted brands next time. Our “culture” is to reflexively submit to the mercy of the various powers that be. The impulse to criticize or push for another standard or definition is punished, or you're just too tired.

For me, I can feel lighter about my impulse to better define and call-out. Did you write a polite, but direct, letter to your upper management the other day telling them to pay everyone considerably more? Do you need to? Yes. Can you afford to? Probably not. I don't like my job, but I'm not clawing my eyes out like I normally would. I can deliberately and meticulously parse out what I like, what I don't, and where it sits with me in the many contexts I exist in at once. That's psychologically regal. That I got to sleep in to 9, get up and write this, look at my bank account and see about a month's worth of similar “effort” between me and getting “even” is physically regal. The things I need are no more or less than we all need, like health insurance, so I don't take it personally like some deficit in my decision making or “simple choice” to spend obscenely for not enough.

I'm full. I'll need to eat again, and I know shit is coming, but I'm full. I get offered more food while I'm full. Whether I'm full of ideas I think more people need to share, or physically stuffed with Thanksgiving leftovers, the implication is to really or genuinely share. We all are packed with as many or more ideas about our lives, the directions we'd like to go, the things we deserve, or the ways we can help. There is no road map. You have to figure out what you're full of, and decide how it needs to be shared. You need to reverse narratives about what you are constrained by and discover what enables you to create. I create blogs. I create “pay us more” emails. I create the half of a friendship or relationship that says, “you must be this good to illicit this much in return.”

It's cold. Most people don't have the priming to hear you. Most people don't have the time. Most people don't have the disposition or the definitions to even understand, nor parrot back, what you've said or what you're doing. That doesn't erase your obligation to try. That doesn't let you off the hook for recognizing things you can be more responsible for. That doesn't unburden you from sorting out your reasons to exist each day. You can choose to respond to how you feel with another brick in your wall or with a brick thrown at your head. You can appreciate the space-heaters and warm blankets, or tell everyone what a piece of junk your air conditioner is. You can always do both, but can you feel which one your behavior is dictated by?

You don't know which part of the water is going to send up a bubble first. You can be sure it's not going to boil if the heat isn't on.

[882] You're Standing On My Neck

I'm going to do my best to put a lot of distance between how “I” might use or understand a word, and how “we” colloquially approach it. I'm also going to try to tie those definitions to a broader picture of what I see as a problem with “politeness.”

T.B.L. is the most emblematic of blogs where I've echoed this.

Certainly, we need a sense of decorum or rules. We need to know that by and large we're going to be met with a helpful or polite tone when we engage one another. Your server shouldn't be cussing you out anymore than your insurance agent because of a normalized social contract. There's a baseline for “moving things along” and getting things done. None of what I'm going to try and argue is ignorant of this necessity. None of what I say will be a referendum on how you feel about your willingness or ability to be polite or under what circumstances. I will not be arguing it shouldn't exist or is “wrong” in an explicit manner.

I will try to argue that how “we,” at least in U.S., understand this politeness is warped and does more harm than good. I will argue that I think there's a fundamental lie that goes routinely ignored at the bottom of our conceptions of “politeness” or “civility.” I think the heart of that lie is personal to each individual, more than some faux objective analysis parsing opinions on tactful engagement.
I've referenced the phrase, “Bless your heart” in the past as emblematic of the lie I'm speaking to. You're neither seeking to bless someone's heart in saying so, nor making an attempt to empathize. It's shorthand. It's common, easy, and considered a “polite,” perhaps Southern, way of implying there's nothing left to say, there's something wrong with you, and conversation or players currently involved are not going to be able to handle it. Bless your heart, and good day.

We know when we need to “escape” a conversation and sentiments like this are employed. As someone prone to “ranting,” I see the reservation and stress start to set in as the words are searched for from someone not used to me. I can appreciate when they signal the flow needs to end, and don't consider it “lying to me” because they are feeling overwhelmed, bad, or incapable of helping. I, too, encounter people who have many many words I don't know how to deal with on top of my already complicated head space.

I think one of the varied and complicated reasons I don't get “help” or “conversation” when it gets too “deep” or “convoluted” is because the mechanisms for doing so effectively have been eroded. I think “critical” thinking has reduced to “reactive scrutiny” for a generation or more. Ideas simply aren't shared or understood. They are default “fights.” They are stressful. They are personal. They threaten our sense of being. And the larger the threat they became, the more refined in our dance moves to avoid them. We implore people to not hurt our feelings, don't name names, and don't dare scar an interaction by what's actually happening. In fact, nothing can ever be happening! So there!

It's old news that people criticize form over substance, burn straw-men indefinitely, and never feel more proud or smug than when they can tout their dodging and bullying as righteous defending. That doesn't make it okay. It's “normal,” at least in our culture. It's so routine as to become something for which we're perfectly blind. We take for granted rules for engaging information and each other like we do shopping or our health. It just is what it is, and by god, here's where the person taking them for granted pivots to my opening “this isn't what I'm arguing against” points like I didn't bother to get out in front of them.

I worry that people don't pay close enough, let alone any, attention to what these habits of politeness or decorum are doing. If you're unable or unwilling to see a difference between practically functioning with these habits and “how to engage with the world,” I think they supplement your responsibility for respecting deeper truths. I think you begin to think being polite or following rules is the be-all end-all. I think when you're pressed to engage that, very broad, “deeper truth,” you react viscerally. That reaction is because you're not willing to build it into the balance of your concept for politeness. Your feistier will, perspective, or impulse is subsumed verses incorporated.

I'm pretty regularly accused of aggressively asserting my impulse. I'm oriented towards the “fight,” to be sure, but I've tempered how I go about doing so over the years. It's perhaps easier for me to recognize the rolled-over conciliatory moves, which I happen to often find gross and disingenuous, even when I often agree about their efficacy and appropriateness. The issue is when I try to drill down on any one specific situation and shift the introspective burden onto you. That's when the politeness goes out the window and the accusations flow. That's when the fight (you knew I was aiming for all along!) begins. It's unfortunate and familiar.

I think a lot of us are dramatically and chaotically more angry than we let on. I think every single person I've ever deigned to share a blog with could write as much or more than me. I think every single friend who has shared with me the depths of their depression and anxiety knows what I'm getting at in my fever-dream or drunk blogs. I think on top of the things we might intimately be able to share of our experience, there are a dozen “normal” things related to family or insecurities or shitty living and work environments plaguing you more than me as well. I say again, for the several thousandth time, I hear NONE of your opinions about your existence unless they are in the form of mischaracterizing something I said, or immediately sharing and hovering over the “unfriend” button when you can't be bothered to unpack why you're doing so.

You're not “handling” me by avoiding anymore than you're handling yourself by pretending things don't drive you fucking crazy like they do me. Also, you can't accuse me of mindlessly bitching and never going anywhere, mostly, because I try to work and create things that combat “my” issues big and small. When you put up an unflinching resistance to examining your habits, it signals to me that you're not just “disagreeing” or being “different” in how you're engaging the world, you're denying it. You're shitting on the very idea that we could get somewhere better and build better habits. I demonstrate, through writing if nothing else, my desire and thought process. I try to get more specific. I try to account for the panic.

You don't have to write pages on pages and feel like complete shit. You don't have to remotely agree with my elevated levels and “word twisting” to find out where you're coming from. You do have to signal, at some point, that what I'm speaking to is remotely relatable, reasonable, and, if only eventually, understandable, so that we're not just two crazy people talking past each other. You have grant me the license and understanding to positions you've raised that I already agree with, and then move onto what I've put forward. You can't do that when modern cultural “polite” metrics are the means by which you're going to engage.

In league with this is the endless open-interpretive sea of “favors” and “good will” that comes along with interpersonal relationships I have no patience for. My neighbor offered to tow my truck. He won't say out lout how much money he wants to do so. This will be the last time I allow him to do me any favors. He has a “polite” way of expressing his desires which I don't find polite. It doesn't express his wants and leaves me wishing I'd just paid the premium to hire a tow company. He's not explicitly “wrong” in his 52-year exercise in communication, but it's not truthful, it's truth-ish, and I don't find it helpful, fair, or productive. I'm not wrong for my disposition, but I'd be wrong in matter-of-factly expecting him to conform to my disposition. So would he. He's not likely to self-obligate himself to that understanding, nor is anyone subject to the rules of “politeness” currently employed.

It's a problem big and small. Who's on board with neoliberals negotiating with the fascists and domestic terrorists? Yes, we employed Nazis and there's a practical necessity for obligating the hopeless and angry to new work and rebuilding. How quickly did we “politely” just try to forget they were Nazis? Did that do us any real favors? Did that instantiate a healthy and rounded perspective to pretend “it can't happen here?” We know Germany is a living memorial with reminders everywhere of how badly they fucked up. We can't stand to face our shitty facebook comments! We habituate making “me” the enemy for pointing out when your words don't seem to match your otherwise forlorn or angry body language, tone, or word choices.

It's important for me to differentiate a sickness from a symptom. I need to recognize something as a tool verses a hasty fix. You should feel skeptical when something feels familiar. You might be rehearsing a pathological response, or you might be employing a failing strategy in your understanding of how things are playing out. I explore my hiccups in argumentation and conversation for that reason. I practice trying to keep it impersonal. I think our culture is deeply sick and we're all poisoned by it in different ways. I don't think we're getting better if we're content to remain on different planets in how we talk about it.

[881] Whoooosh

I have an hour.

I've made some calls, changed supervisors, attempted to coordinate getting my car towed from my neighbor who used our morning conversation to pitch me on buying his plot. Now, I have an hour before I'm off to a home with Trump literally mounted above the TV and every propaganda sign running down along the sides.

I have an hour “to myself” or of “free time” in which I'm writing, because I feel like most of my “off” hours consist of hours like these. They are sandwiched. They consist of the mid-stream catch of thoughts, not the ones I managed to remember after I got home. There's still things to do today. I'm not shaking off the fog of just waking up, and I'm not worked into an exasperated tizzy trying to piece back some picture I can recognize.

One thing I've dramatically underappreciated about myself is how much I need something to look forward to. All of the chaos kicked up by the proverbial “shoulder shrug” I tend to get in response to my complaints, inquiries, or asserted goals is often mitigated when I know I've got something I genuinely want to do or know I'll have the time to approach correctly. I don't want to pack in 7 articles to read in this hour, even if I look forward to reading them. I'm not going to start toying with raising the corner of my little room, I'm liable to cut open my work clothes.

I differentiate “tasks” or chores from things I'm looking forward to doing. Paying attention is work, so even reading things I want to, it's a task or chore to remain remotely informed or in touch with some level of art or media appreciation. Getting my room built was what I looked forward to. Mitigating all of the details to not have it flooding are chores. Cuddling up to watch a movie Allie mentions is something to look forward to. Marathoning an arbitrary list from some ill-informed pseudo taste-maker is a chore.

Whether it's work or home, I like to create a flow. It's a psychological state of doing instead of thinking about the doing. I don't want to think about erroneous details on top of coping with whatever stress comes along with being around annoying people. I don't want to start a project on the land, only to be missing any means of addressing issues without a 2 hour foray into town. Flow only happens when you have the details accounted for. Do you know when you're going to input your notes? Then you don't have to think about when you're going to. Do you know you have an array of screw sizes and the drill bit heads on hand? The tools then lend themselves to experimental fixes when the first plan inevitably goes to shit.

Without flow, life looks like a series of stuck or stopping points with way too many words employed to describe what's going on. I'm writing to hopefully continue my flow. I'm searching for more things to look forward to as my dumbass species ensures we keep needing to lock things down. I have my plan for the rest of my evening. I've confirmed my usual supervised visit for tomorrow. I've got my supervision setup for the day after. I don't know what the hiccups will be, from prolonged unnecessary conversations to the weather or, god forbid more car trouble, but each of those can or should have ways of being mitigated.

Whether or not they can or should is the mess we get into on the whole. If you're stopped or stuck at needing basic necessities, obviously life feels much worse than it has to and you're looking for who to blame. Whether you actually parse out what's your responsibility or “the world's” is anyone's guess, but I'm solidly in the “you won't parse that out” camp. What I choose to hold up as worth looking forward to in light of that becomes an ongoing and difficult task. Can I help myself? Can I find the will and desire for increasingly minute pieces of a complicated puzzle? I still believe I need to escape the country and in the next thought consider what details I need to consider for a soffit. It makes my stomach knot.

These kinds of hours are a lot of directionless contemplation. Could I settle in to watch another episode? Should I do some light cleaning? There's different modes of thought and mental prep that make any option feel more or less appropriate. We're not like flipping switches triggering on “do the dishes” or flipping to “dig a hole” in an instant. I think this is an important point that I'm not sure I have enough words to elaborate on more, but here's a seed.

When I'm doing “yard work,” my habit is to start one thing, and find myself picking away at other little things. I might drag over a shelf, start stacking things on it, grab the rake, and decide I need to spread out an ash/dirt pile. While doing so, I'll cough, grab my wholly inadequate face mask, and while inside notice a misplaced box of screws. Those screws now need to be returned, and the table they're sitting on better arranged. I trip on the hose, pull the hose into a coil, and realize the head needs replaced, where one might exist on the “wrong” shelf, so I return to the new shelf I'm filling up to designate as a place for hose heads like “this” one. Add in little construction things and whether or not different equipment has been gassed and primed, and over the course of a few hours, I'll do a dozen things, and only planned to do 1 or 2. The area will look nice, and Allie will come home wondering why I have a sander in my hand and am going on about my plans for the fire pit.

It's a clusterfuck up there that generally translates toward the direction I want to go. It's a kind of natural selection applied to my thought process. I drift in the direction of my available resources, time, and oriented thoughts. I'm almost perfectly ambivalent about any one thing I might do until it serves a particular purpose. Why complete the fence until the neighbor is uncomfortably leering? Why spend the money in service to (x) without some relatively quick turn-around and satisfaction with regard to (y)? There's always "everything” to do, and I'm not “just doing” things to remain busy or distracted, I'm trying to get to that flow space. I'm trying to work in a manner that suggests purpose and foresight.

I think my personal exploration of my process speaks to the whole because we don't know nor are inclined toward one thing over the other. We have many catastrophes at once. Who's in charge? We celebrated and elected people who said “no one” on purpose, and worse, we'll break everything you might use to try. We based our potential flow on a giant mythology about who we are and the influence we have on the world. We transferred our agency and capacity for self-reflection onto that mythology. There's no flow but around the drain. There's not a framework that you can do a dozen-pieces-at-a-time kind of yard work style. There's no trust that the effort is going to translate to an appreciable amount of positive feeling or status. An election is not a switch that will flip all of that around.

Leadership is important. I think that premise alone has been degraded immensely. “Managing” something is not the same thing as leading it. People who attempt to manage me get burned severely. People who join in the leading mindset to proactively address something find me the easiest person on the planet to work with. I'm not a series of problems, but an agent of interpretative and creative problem solving. Whether or not you, I, or the environment we're in has the resources to address those problems meaningfully is the often shitty circumstances that say, “No.” You shrug your shoulders and stare blankly as a manager because no one directed you to do anything. You learn to accept what you must, while thinking otherwise as a leader. You're still trying when you lead, despite a level of implied victimization or martyrdom.

I want a kind of “total flow.” I want enough money to move on quickly. I want enough connections to know exactly who to call. I want enough plans that can be spoken to in big or little ways every day. I don't want to be digging myself out of constant panic. I don't want to get lost in petty personality battles or left to decide to what degree I'm willing to manipulate or entertain your complex. I want to wake up and get to work, not desperately cling to my agency in spare moments or hours. I don't want to stack an impersonal stream of information on top of my sense of futility in an attempt to suppress or suffocate the truth of the pain of my deepest despondency.

I have about 20 minutes. I'm going to take my borrowed car to a visit in my neighborhood. I'm going to demonstrate that I'm capable, safe, and worthy of ensuring a child gets to see her father. I'm not going to get paid “enough” to do it. I'm going to get home later than I want to. I haven't discovered what I'm looking forward to, except I'm pretty sure Allie plans to make breakfast for dinner, so things are probably alright.

[880] Victim Eyes

Honestly, for what has felt like a building and building for months, my brain is on fire. I feel as though were I ever able to re-learn how to cry, maybe I could be persuaded to shut off the endless conversations with myself and inability to stop digging. Digging, that is, unaware if I’m trying to reach bottom, some treasure, or just to back fill a hole I’ve previously dug.

I get a lot of ideas about what I’m going to do when I’m on the road driving home. I get home, blow them all off, and then do things like start writing this, or eat when I’m not that hungry, or settle in for a sped up show I’m half-paying attention to. I have hours of my weekly work to record. I have a calendar to establish. I have details as it pertains to home maintenance to finish. I have to keep talking. The obsessive button is stuck on, and I can’t help myself.

I can’t help myself. I think this is the point of no return for people. You either reach that point and break down, or you humble yourself and look for the right kinds of help. I can’t help myself. I don’t have enough information. I don’t have the resources. I don’t have the language. I don’t have the time. I might not even have the best or most appreciable grasp of my own problem. No louder does the point of swallowing, “I can’t help myself” sound as it hits your stomach than when other people are helping you.

I panic when I need help. I don’t want to waste your time or money driving to help me only to discover I forgot it was Saturday and our plan is foiled because the shop my truck sits at is closed. I don’t want to think about you moving things around in your garage where you said I could put mine while we work on it. I don’t want to think about driving your friend-of-a-friend’s car in shitty weather or the potential accidents. I don’t want to feel this burden to pay you to bother with me at all.

The whole concept of “help” or “equal exchange” throws me. It nags the sense I’ve developed for getting taken advantage of or taken for granted. I can know full-well how eager I am to please and wish to contribute meaningfully to what someone else is doing, but I can barely cope with the idea that my neighbor would offer to let me use his tools or tow the truck for me. I have to fight to believe that anyone would just lend me their knowledge in helping get the truck repaired. It’s unfair to them and my best impulses. It’s an irrational fear that my worst most selfish instincts are getting something for nothing.

There’s very few people I think I have a grasp on what I mean to them. I’ve also invested in people who my presumed understanding in no way matched how little I in fact did. I get this wave of appreciative emotion if someone is willing to pick me up when my car dies. I expect to be left to shiver if it’s cold, pay a shit ton to be towed, and it’s probably going to be raining, so when good will or friendship enters into that disaster-construct I bring, I’m overwhelmed. I want to believe it’s not anymore of a “burden” or “problem” for someone to “deal with me” than I would if any of you genuinely needed something from me. Unfortunately, the vast majority of my relationships and experiences are based in lies.

It’s probably why I’m so moved to constantly write. I can’t trust my perspective, so I have to keep investigating it against the good and bad things that happen. I have to keep my decisions and expectations in some kind of check, or my mind is otherwise begging for an excuse to spiral. Nothing ever feels particularly balanced, which is why I lend myself to taking on too much or being hopelessly optimistic that with a banal but persistent focus and work ethic, it’ll all manifest eventually. I’m dodging people’s chance to help me as I view them as attempts to emotionally leverage or manipulate. I’m waiting for the problem to compound, and be left worse than if I just had to fix things alone. Like, imagine your friend’s tire popping in coming to pick you up.

I guess this also speaks to how little trust I have for anyone. I’m probably going to replace my tire, come pick you up, and go buy another tire. I feel at the butt of, “Well it popped while I was coming to get you!” kind of arguments all the time. Someone else not terribly well-off in a position to afford a new tire uses their dire and dramatic life to assign blame; repeat ad nauseum. Why run the risk of provoking that response? Why attack your already feeble understanding of the ways in which anybody might be allowed to help you? You can completely avoid a food fight if you never invite them to dinner.

Whether you wish to regard it as a kind of super power or extreme liability, I’m positive I’m shaped by some series of chemical flourishes and imbalances that send my spider senses into a frenzy. Most people tip me off the wrong way. The ones who haven’t then have to surmount my “intellectualizing” of their presumed living-failure state. If they’re either suffering the same kind of symptoms, dispositionally aberrant in their niceness, or prove themselves in some kind of fairytale fashion, then I might take a chance in asking for anything or “more.”

I’m tired of losing or failing for bad reasons. I make the distinction between my clients where there are those who are poor and trying, or poor and cunts blaming everything but themselves. If I broke my car joyriding or off-roading instead of side-hustling, I’d feel less inclined to argue my job should find the language or responsibility to collaborate and shoulder some of the burden. Not even my friend, my fucking job that profits 10-to-1 off the work I do for it. My job that doesn’t pay me enough to not find side-hustling necessary. People shouldn’t be made to suffer because of judgment or indignation unless it’s their own.

None of us ask for the myriad things that seek to shit on or influence us every day. We cope by detaching. We cope by downplaying and parroting. We drink or get way into our hobbies. We overburden sentimentality. We work ourselves until we’re too exhausted to think. We don’t feel helpful, and at least for me, therefore can’t trust help offered by others. We recognize the problems as bigger than our daily buckets of water against the forest fire. We know we haven’t run enough to even escape the boulder’s shadow, let alone had time or energy to ponder the size and origin of that boulder.

Knowing you need help and being able to find it are two different things. I know I need help. I know I can access certain kinds of help for certain kinds of things. I’m not entirely sure if some things related to my thoughts and compulsions can really be helped, medication aside. I don’t know that I want to be numb or hazy when calm or worked-up, the threats are real. Whether they constitute threats to your life or reduce to daily negotiated realities, they’re shaping what you can see out of yourself and other people. They’re living and breathing the ongoing reality to navigate.

I try to “think” away my panic. I try to write my feelings into a corner where they certainly consider what that good cry might feel like, indefinitely, until I’ve ground my teeth down and conjured a new headache. This contributes to my desire to compulsively act. STOP THINKING I plead with myself, GO DO. And what is there to do? March and yell? My homework? My detailed little fixes rounding out my selfish little space I’m only entitled to provided the wrong people aren’t paying attention?

I only feel “at home” in those imperfect expressions of the consistent ideals. It’s only when I’m working in service to ideas and people I believe in that the insecure doubt and panic are erased. Yard work becomes a joy, because a better future accompanies each shovel-full. You can feel genuine enthusiasm for other people’s junk as it now represents a learning opportunity or larger commercial presence. Misunderstandings or open questions feel like they deserve your attention and are capable of being brought to a resolution. The next disagreement is a chance to refine an exacting appreciation for where you’re headed together. You’re encouraged by and to figuring out what needs helped and where. The reciprocity is built in, not baselessly expected nor poised for abuse.

I feel abused. I feel like I’m made to continually explain how I could get less black eyes if you’d stop installing so many pointless doorknobs, and right at eye-level. We both refrain from saying the quiet part out loud about how many you’re regularly throwing at me. I’ve learned that when you tell people that’s what happened, they’ll let you borrow a screwdriver. Or they’ll accuse you of dragging good doorknob installers through the mud. Or they’ll tell you to crank your head back so you take the blow at a point that bruises less easily. The victim in me panics, distrusts, over-analyzes, and wants to instantly burn things down. The vast majority of the time, the victim doesn’t make the rules or dictate my response.

[879] First Response

The theme is familiar, the layers are many, and the word is “responsibility.” I’ve said a fair amount about responsibility already, but a mild “crisis” today has put it back into focus.

In the past, I’ve said things to the effect of “I’m always responsible” or “it’s always up to me” or “it’s always my fault.” I’ve lamented how often people were happy to thrust responsibility on me for starting the party (no one who attends can be bothered to take any or start their own), making the comment (no one with ears should feel attacked or uncomfortable), or otherwise forcing my will, perspective, or intention onto an otherwise perfectly innocent situation (no no, *you absolutely are negative*, just too proud, defensive, blind, judgmental, etc to see it).

A few days ago, my car functionally lost its breaks. I took it to a shop nearby, two days later, they hit me with a $4500 bill. I’m a social worker. I’m already in $2000 debt. That shit ain’t getting fixed at that shop for that amount. As it happens, I work for a company that has company cars. You’re able to get one after 90 days. Whether or not that actually happens is based on what has previously been explained as a messy and imperfect system. They have cars sitting around, but not the keys to pilot them. They have every aspect of their business online, except the sign-out for who needs an available van and when.

I live an hour from work. Yesterday, I was assigned a new case in my neighborhood. I went to what should have been a 30 minute run through of house-keeping paperwork. It turned into a 3 hour marathon attempting to persuade a pedophile idiot that his overprotective wife was not “losing her rights” by not being allowed to attend the supervised visit. It’s 8 pm by the time I’m done, 10 minutes away from my house, 50 from the office. I went home. The rule is to have non-personal cars back at the office each day.

Allie would have picked me up. I could have told myself a story about the ups and downs of social work and how this was just a “tough day” that went long and I can focus extra on “self care” over my Friday/Saturday weekend. I wouldn’t have inconvenienced a worker who needed the car today, who texted me to explain the details of his plight, only to find himself apologizing to me when I explained my struggling experience to mesh with the same scatter-brained conception of management and accountability that seems to plague the social work field. When I told him I tried to get out ahead of today, weeks ago, he said, “Oh! I know exactly what you’re talking about!” relaying the familiar feeling of attempting to anticipate something and do better, only to get shit on.

I did try. I explained that my work truck is just that, one I work with. It was in rough shape before I put two thousand pounds of space heaters in it. It's needed brakes, calipers, rods, and a general inspection for a minute. I return to, I’m a social worker already in debt; a fancy well-running truck is a fantasy us poor people don’t indulge. When it breaks bad enough you have to take it to a shop, you pray it’ll only put you another month behind. I told my supervisor I was on track to spend $600 a month just in gas to do the job. Not anything extra, like commuting, or taking mini trips across the state trying to bilk the mileage reimbursement. Just the picking up and transporting between visit locations and getting to clients. I also offered to pay a premium on what it already costs to have a company car for personal use.

“Yeah, it sucks, but you just have to deal.”

This company was happy to send me on the road with other people’s children in a car that was not mechanically sound. It worked “well-enough” for a couple weeks. They were only concerned I had the right insurance, another extra expense when I didn’t carry enough. I’ve had grinding brakes on other vehicles for many months before. It wasn't even on my radar that they would just give out, as they did when I was alone and pulling into the work parking lot. How terrible of a thought can you conjure as to what could’ve happened in bad weather or on the wrong turn?

When I said how much I put into fixing past issues with my truck, my supervisor turned it into a pissing match citing $1300 for one past employee’s misfortune to my $800 several months ago. He relayed a story of not having spare keys for vehicles that were used by two employees on vacation. Whether or not spare keys could be obtained was beyond the point, he could only think to pile on to the disorganized sentiment as evidence of our mutual futility. When I learned of the bill, I relayed it to him immediately, and explained there was no price point I could currently entertain that was going to get it to bare-minimum status. His only question, “How soon can you get it fixed??” felt like a slap.

Our last staffing, my supervisor started leaning on the idea that the “sympathy period” for being a new hire was over. 3 weeks in, 3 completely and last-minute changes or additions to my schedule, and if I wasn’t making my hours, it was going to be a challenge to consider me full-time and allow for all the “benefits.” Last staffing he relayed to me that 3 people previously hired took 3 to 6 months before they had relatively consistent schedules. I’ve had exactly zero say in who I got, what times they were used to, or whether or not I could retain ones after they wanted to foist a problem client onto me after he’d chewed through 8 previous caseworkers.

So, disorganized, implicit threats, side-eye from my regional manager after I sent an email to our “I’m here to help new hires!” guy detailing my experience, and I’m sitting at home on my “day off” having spent a good portion of the day returning the van, answering texts, and writing emails in attempts to troubleshoot how to get a car from a company that contracts with a rental car company. My truck is still in the parking lot an hour away needing to be towed to...who knows where, and I’ve got two coworkers who are car savvy that might be able to help me make the repairs for 90% less money over a considerably longer period of time.

Where and what are we to make of the different levels of responsibility? We’re pretty reflexive in regarding how we exercise our care and attention as fair to good. From my little perch, I feel I have a responsibility to keep myself fed and housed, so I get a job. The terms of that job implicate me at different levels, from the reliability of my car, to my ability to regulate my mood enough to deal with the incredibly dumb or hostile in an ongoing basis. I have to attempt to communicate clearly to management and clients. I have to maintain standards of safety and timing. I have to be comprehensive and record every single text message I send. I have to make less than inflation-adjusted minimum wage.

I think, in spite of the ask or “requirement,” my responsibility stops at donating my car. It stops before any remaining health in that car is exhausted to anything beyond things that are making me money or getting me where I need to go. I think I stop wanting to take responsibility when the response to my efforts to mitigate problems at my less-than-accounted-for levels go ignored or are deliberately downplayed. I think I’m less inclined to take responsibility when I’m in an environment that trains the impulse out of you.

I’ve been a manager. I’ve been a supervisor. They’ve been at a “smaller” scale than all that is involved with social work, but I know my impulses and ideas on how I would try to fix something were a similar problem brought to me. I’d have asked or told me where to go to find out if paying a premium might work, not reiterated the policy (changed as recently as within the last few months in response to two idiots drag racing in company cars). I’d have offered to get you home if you were going to be functionally stranded at night having dropped off the car like a good policy soldier. I would have asked Enterprise for a goddamn spare key, or paid the expedited shipping to get it sent from wherever they were on vacation (and, goddammit, Covid, they shouldn’t be far).

Why would I do that? Because I’m in the business of parents seeing their children. I’m in the business of keeping people in their home and retaining rights. I’m trying to save time and money by keeping people from selling all of their worldly possessions to keep their kids in diapers. I’m not enabling you on aimless joyrides or feeling resentful that you’d feel so ”entitled” to be able to carry out your duties without losing money.

Here we hit the existential crisis. I see parallels in my day-to-day that are mere echoes of our cultural failings and reckoning. We haven’t figured out that things “don’t have to be this way.” It is entirely possible to pay people fairly. It isn’t just your right, but your duty to be indignant about being taken advantage of. We can acknowledge when we see problems coming and plan, like building dams to stop inevitable floods or refraining from building in the floodplain altogether. Increasingly, we can no longer claim ignorance about the grounds on which we’re building houses.

If you don’t know better, you can chalk anything up to “that’s life.” Richard Wolff explains that he used to give talks about “the system” and people would have blank stares. They had no idea it wasn’t normal to work 3 jobs, be stressed out and exhausted, and not have healthcare because “capitalism” and the ethics that come along with it were beaten into them their whole lives. Now, to someone like me, saying “duty” to describe maximizing profits to rich shareholders sounds beyond absurd, not matter-of-fact good business. Our duty is to each other, and we can’t pretend that we’re able to serve when we’re knee-capped by willful blindness.

We’re not paid enough. Our cars aren’t up to the hundreds of miles a week driving. You don’t have a problem of “morale,” you have a problem with “truth.” Maybe your organization is trying to grow beyond what it can pay for. Maybe it’s not making the right kind of sacrificing and elevating the right kinds of behaviors to deserve to survive. This is such a common and familiar theme, you can easily trick yourself into thinking it’s just the way things are or that there’s something universal about what failures humans are.

We’re now prepared to be crippled by our resilience. Every possible rationalization comes to a head. Every horror story shared not to sympathize and build solidarity, but to one-up and belittle. Think of the kids that need to be fed! Just one more week I need to make it through. Think of how bad that guy has it! My wage at least has “teen” in it! That’s good money! You’re not being responsible enough!! Pick up not just your emotional baggage, but the tab, and please smile after swallowing every offered platitude. There you go!

I felt on the verge of breaking on the ride into town today. The naked ass of “existence, so-insisted” was working its way past my eyes, into my brainstem, and down into my chest and guts. Again, my attempts at exercising responsibility and foresight were denied. Again, I’m made to play last-minute and wag-the-finger at the expedient and desperate move to not be compelled off the plank into the seas of endless sacrifice. Again, I’m met with the idea that I’m on my own, or at the mercy of how much I want my baggage to spill into the lives of my friends or family. Allie’s not a cab service. If you’re upset I can’t afford a nicer car, you need to spend some time alone until better thoughts start to hit you.

The great irony is that we’re always all responsible all the time. We structure society to give a stronger resolution for obligations and responsibilities for those at the top, and they may or may not have a genuine aptitude or moral authority. As a piddling regular Nazi, it’s you who carries out the order. It’s you who accepts the conditions. It’s you who shoots deserters. I feel left out to dry. My friend offered to let me use a spare car he happens to have he’s been keeping for a buddy overseas. That’s not his job or responsibility, he chose to make it his job and responsibility. It’s still not. Nor was it his job to buy this asshole client a phone so he could keep progressing through his visits.

It’s easy to blame yourself when you don’t know who to otherwise. It’s easy to act like it’s not a big deal when you happen to have the fix or the ability to move past the issue quickly. This is why rich people suck. “Life,” as we’re made to worship through ritual excuses, doesn’t “happen” to them in the same way. Bad things certainly do, because life sucks, but they won’t be broken by a totaled vehicle. They’ll have nightmares about how long they were on the phone with an insurance company. This is why competent people get exhausted or a really dark bent. They don’t grasp they’re being taken advantage of, or don’t want to admit it, and become the loudest cheerleader that pretends they’re on “top” and everything is copacetic if you could just find that team spirit.

When I get the opportunity, as I’ve attempted to create it myself, I want people as partners. If I make more, it'll be because I do more, but we don’t have to pretend I’m benign in my desire or use of power and money. That's what we’ve done. We’ve glorified opportunists, exploiters, and psychopaths as “founders” with some kind of special wisdom because their thing happens to exist instead of someone else’s. What could a doctor (this company’s founder) who studies mental health have besides anything but the best intentions? Ask the growing amount of money coming from government contracts, because when I find out it’s a penchant for Fabergé eggs, I’m going to demand more than a basically functioning car.

I’m still operating under the pseudo-bearable plight and obligation to continually speak truth to power. I still believe that I influence people, they influence me, and though I may never see or meet them, what I say and how I say it matters. It matters now, it will matter later. In order to take responsibility you need the means, the tools, and the will and wisdom to discern how to go about it at different levels. I’m responsible for myself, my people, my home, and the ones I attempt to help as they exhaust my time and patience each day. I certainly “asked” for some level of drama and obligation by taking this job, but that ask was compelled by a whole lot of forces beyond my control that need to be spoken to as well. Whether you can actually do something meaningful within such a domineering system to change or corrode is the open question.

I’m going to try and fix my truck. I’m going to rely on my friends to help, pay just enough to keep the chaos in some makeshift car bay long enough to keep making barely enough to fix barely enough. I went into work with all of the equipment they issued me prepared to just leave it and get off the familiar wheel as quickly as I was able to recognize it. My friends’ willingness to unfairly share the responsibility is going to stoke my sensibility as well. Fuck the world that gorges on those sacrifices.