[xx-17] This & More

Just a collection of lengthier statuses and ideas I’m grouping/saving for posterity:

Unfortunately, I think the democrats are going to remain the party that forsook taking responsibility and leadership for so long they allowed the consequences of these republican administrations and they're going to continue to fuck with even the idea of hope for making things better.

Joe Biden winning South Carolina is indicative of the old adages about familiarity and "electability" and the deep-rooted sense that people get about those things. It's anchoring and psychological pacifying.

I live in nowhere Indiana, have shit health care, shit food options, shit prospects at my job and nothing begging me to switch where I'll be appreciated or make more. I have no belief there will be social security when I'm old. I have no sense of community or camaraderie with my own generation let alone the youth alleged to save us all with their cancel culture and "problematic" ideas about what constitutes morality.

"Revolution," to me, would constitute basic living standards, not feeling on the brink of a mental breakdown every day, and believing this was a world worth bringing anyone into. "Radical" has come to mean whispering the very means of survival and reason for living. I can't point to a single thing besides Sanders who has remained so consistently speaking to the inside-out and poisoned heart at the center of our concept of being a country. That it's even a question or a toss-up in the minds of millions of people is as horrifying to me as the amount of people I saw supporting Sarah Palin in ANY capacity.

You can't be forgiven. This is what is lost. You can't be forgiven for giving yourself to fascism. You can't be forgiven for allowing people to get sick and die because your "leadership" doesn't believe in evolution or disease. You can't get back the lost years, wages, or sense of dignity and self-respect unless you're looking for a pseudo-convict story where you're undyingly grateful to have your job as a chef after 30 years behind bars.

I've been thinking a lot about when you throw in the towel. When is it worth it to fight, and keep pushing for as long as it takes? How do you recognize the cause worth championing? Ever more, I don't believe there's a point. I think the people in power get there for reasons that don’t have anything to do with merit or worth, and we have a linguistic and emotional culture that spins fairy-tales as to where we belong and what we deserve. I can't save DCS. We'll get eaten alive by a virus and die before ever admitting the depravity that is Trump. And there's nowhere to go but in circles.

All I have is the ability to talk about it as earnestly and honestly as I can. And that won't be enough to change or fix things, and it will disappear into the feed of so many memes, and I'll piss back off into my field attempting to squeeze what I can before they/it comes for me.

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What does this mean?!

"I think people break in this job after the slow creep of the reality triggers a yet acknowledged explosion."

A day at DCS is a lot like a roulette wheel. So many places the ball can land, most you're indifferent towards if you pick black or red, or have a disposition that sits safely and comfortably in your color of choice. There's still zeroes. They exist, and they'll blow up your even-enough odds.

"Like, one day I'm going to smell a cat box, blackout, and rip someone in half."

Triggers are individual to each person, but the smell of shitty cat boxes is at once familiar and all-to common, so I thought it most relatable.

"They're so cliché in their piece-of-shittery and indignation and entitlement and you watch them cultivate the suicide ideation in their elementary aged child."

People with the genuine problems are the absolute worst. They hate you for caring or trying. They talk out of both sides of their mouths. You can track the complexes they're building into their children, sometimes in real time. They are PROUD of their ignorance and hostile to good intentions or change. They plague the minds of the children in their care in modeling this behavior, and it rips kids to shreds.

" It's no longer "just" about the getting blown off or individual circumstance and presumed humanity."

Your elevated place in the hierarchy of all things becomes apparent. You don't get to tell yourself a "happy" or justified story about "mere humanity" and how it behaves. No, you get to put names and faces to the same kind of dropped balls and excuses. You get to imagine the larger world of kids under the same kind of tutelage. Your intervention becomes a moral obligation, religious principle, or spiritual calling as every decision translates into real fallout right in front of you.

"It becomes the daily equation of assholes and the stark realization of the depravity thusly emblemated in your moral breakdown and incongruity."

Your brain mashes things and tries to condense and understand. So the soup of different kinds of pathology play together in unforseeable ways. That overbearing asshole plus this pathologically lying mom plus those smug teens across 3 or 4 families can reveal hidden worlds of disdain and dejectedness. You're good, no? You show up, and try, and explain, and yet look them. LOOK AT THEM!

"There is no logic, no book, and no disposition for that visceral internal subconscious equation that can save you or them."

The cutesy way to talk about this is "burnout." You don't realize you're being eaten. You don't understand all of the things you've become attached to that are pulling all the time. You're coping, maybe, until you're not.

"Here's hoping if it happens it's to someone that deserves it. The odds are in your favor."

They all do, we all do, in some form or another.

[838] Need For Speed

I rarely do this (write at random? That's all I do...), but I've got some time before an appointment scheduled late and far away, and for whatever reason I'm a touch anxious.

I know this job isn't worth it. I know it's not worth my time tonight, waiting for an hour in the parking lot before I drive a half hour in the opposite direction of where I live. I know I have a project waiting for me at home I want to keep playing with that I won't really be able to without it being exponentially darker and colder. I know that I'm on another trek to waste my time in service to children who aren't in danger based on a call that we should never have gotten but for bad protocol at the probation offices. I feel less bad about this waste of time than I normally do, but I acknowledge it as explicitly a waste.

As well, I've been trying to find someone to go to this concert on Thursday. When I say things like "I don't have friends," I mean it took chance and rehearsal to get even a consistent bowling/trivia time set up. I don't have a "Yes, let's go" type person in my circle. So now I'm weirdly inviting the entire office to wing it at a band they haven't heard of at a bar that's less than ideal. The weird thing about it isn't my shopping around the ticket, it's that it's predicated mostly on my dislike for the idea of wasting money. I'd rather someone I don't really know or get along with have a mediocre time actually "doing the thing" verses have a ticket get burned? That's weird.

I've gotten a touch loose with my spending. That means I spent $200 on things I've been meaning to buy for months-years. The paycheck that will put me to within hundreds of being out of debt is submitted. I've picked up odd-jobs on Craigslist that might prove able to trickle in $60-$200 here and there. I'm feeling like I'm back in a kind of fervent swing that causes unnecessary tension and attempts to insert myself into situations that might prove more stimulating than whatever it is I'm currently looking at. That I'm even writing this blog right now is evidence of it.

I'm really starting to feel the potential life changing state of having things paid well in advance and being flatly indulgent. I'm feeling comfortable getting the tools and odds and ends to round out the kind of existence my Amazon wishlist has been flirting with. I'm getting a touch more callous and disingenuous in my commentary. It's a slow creep, but it's creeping. If there were some kind of cosmic balancing act regarding our individuated energy, it's clearly going to take more than 2 years of a job that epitomizes joyless slog to erase my underling impulse and drive.

I'm moving into the "taking" mindset. Nick P., so mythologized, doesn't haplessly beg for someone to accompany him to a show, he practically picks them up and takes them. This is the internal conflicting impulses. How to defer to a kind of "professional" tone and atmosphere, that dead-inside pleasantries of daily interaction, while your chest is raging to encourage the entire party to jam the fuck out. Do you know how often I dream about when I was called on stage at Warped? I need that insane attention and energy infused into whatever I'm doing.

I had the thought, which sorta prompted me bothering to write, that what we do isn't helping. We put "happily ever after" dialogue atop the broad picture of poverty or generally shit behavior. You got your kids returned? Cool. What horrors would we discover, on both ends, that spoke to why they were removed in the first place? Things that weren't fixed in 6 months of on and off therapy?

It made me think of the idea for "radical selfishness." There's a Jesus Freak guy in our office. Incredibly well-adjusted, personable, engaged with his families, nice as hell, but goddammit, he's a Jesus freak. The story about the strip club comes up. He's never been. What kind of booze are we going to give the homeless population at Shalom Center in order to get credible information? He doesn't drink. He says he drank all of the non-alcoholic beer at his bachelor party; I make the joke that's when his real dark side comes out and he pisses on the strippers. That's not a joke for Jesus land.

I still conceive of faith as a form of my so-named radical selfishness, but in its naive state. It's a prescribed story superimposed on the person underneath who might actually get off on pissing on strippers. There's the self-righteous do-gooder faith in this field from those who routinely think they can genuinely "always act in the best interest of the child." That they're the one acting is all they need; don't look too close.

But you still need to feel good about what you do. Or you need to couch what you do into the overall story about how you feel good about yourself. I feel good when I'm killing it. It doesn't really matter what I'm doing, I want to be the best, even when I think it would cost considerably more than it is worth to be so. (This was a big reason I stopped playing video games for a long time. Perfect scores and achievements be dammed when paired with an obsessive mind.) So I do the odd-job in the middle of the day for the extra $60. I schedule to meet someone in between wipes of my ass. That's above and beyond the call of duty. That's, until now, the story you tell yourself about yourself about the kind of person you are and how the "secret" to getting shit done isn't so secret.

I hadn't been clenching my jaw for what seemed like weeks. I had settled into something. I had figured a way of cycling through the vague anxiety and just powered through the day. The tension is coming back. That tension is "hope" for as much as I hate the word. That tension is acknowledging that potential inability to reign in the horse of jokes about pissing on strippers and the money to buy things in service to increasingly obnoxious attempts to show you what's going on in my mind. Part of me is just screaming non-stop from inside my chest.

I'm leaving for that appointment soon. It's going to be a late night. I'll probably stay up later than I should after making a meager attempt to assemble the first piece of my PVC tent idea. I'll think about showering and then figure I can just keep not standing close to people and pretend I'm going to get up early enough to go to Planet Fitness where it could last longer than 4 minutes. The mundane will hopefully keep winning (keeping me calm) until I've saved enough that were something to go critical it wouldn't register as a threat to my progress. Cross your fingers.

[837] One Day At A Time

What would be a mark of true genius? I'm not shy in referring to myself as a measure of “smart.” But I consistently talk a very large game about the very large game I consider life. I don't know if me making a certain amount of money or raising a certain number of buildings would be a good measure. Idiots make money. The laziest way to conceive of someone as genius is to watch the consequences of their power loosely slung. Trump isn't a genius, nor is anyone riding his crazy coattails or whispering in his ear. No one tagging along rises above opportunist. That's tagging along in the environment provided by your wealth, or benefiting in the wake of chaos.

If I were an ignorant mystical type, I would start to believe that any one moment in time was somehow something I was “destined” for. Like life was conspiring to put me at DCS, meet my band of coworkers, put me through the different stressors related to different clients and “leadership.” It would pair my inability to ever let things go with pushing 900 blogs of self-indulgent flame stoking indignation and motivation attempting to justify a degree of self-awareness and angst best embodied in the world of folklore.

Today, I was told I gave someone hope for the/their future at DCS. I was told by another person that they believe in me and are relieved that I said I might actually have a reason that makes me want to come to work. When another employee tried to phrase me as “cornering” another coworker, she clapped back and said no, I think he has a lot of really good ideas and I'd love to help. We talked for an hour this morning about what the trickling of changing hearts and minds mind look like in the crafting of an elite team to prove just how much can be done with the right process, paycheck, and mindset.

Would it be a measure of true genius to corral 18 different personalities under of higher-than-average functioning people with the capacity to embody and juggle the lives of dozens of people at once under one umbrella? Would I have made a dramatic and incalculable impact on the world if I forced the standard of behavior and direction from supervisors to match what's proven most effective for me? If I bent the hand back of a classically immovable and rotten institutional mindset, where would I sit then? It's a problem worth tackling. It's a problem worth taking the time. It's a problem that, having gone unaddressed for so long, literally, when we mess up in easy yet profound ways, we fuck children.

Who else can say that? If you don't do a background check, a child might get placed in a home where they literally get fucked. This has happened! If you don't answer your phone, a women in crisis is about to attempt suicide. That happened last weekend. If you don't leave to photograph a severe injury, a child can get murdered the next day. Of the 5 dead children cases one of our assessors has, 4 are murders. (Thankfully, not because we failed to act.)

Don't you want rockstars doing this kind of work? Don't you want people who feel like they're paid enough to not have to worry about the rent or car breaking down? Don't you want them to move fast, focus on the people over wasting hours smoothing out the kinks of bad software and lazily translated calls? Shouldn't the organization tasked with removing your children have a large and informative relationship with the community in which it operates? Do you want the person examining your life and relationships to hate every minute you're relaying your story for the 13th time because they can't process your trauma in real time having never addressed their own?

Realistically, I could work from sun up till sun down every day, handle 40-50 assessments, not resent being on-call, and collect all of the surrounding pieces which constitute a 360 degree holistic view of your family. I can't do that for $1200 a paycheck. I can do it for $2000 + overtime, and without the “place filler to up the numbers” person you hired to fuck things up before I get there. The people who attempt to belabor just how much you really really need to love helping the children try to hide the reality that this isn't so much a job as it is a lifestyle. When you're dealing with people, you are embodying, empathizing, and processing whatever random emotions they want to hit you with. Whether you got to eat at lunch, enough sleep, or have addressed the longstanding issue a dozen times or not, you're the plug that fits all holes. And you're paid less than a manager of an Arby's.

I have to build the template for turning a regional State institution into my bitch. I have two most experienced workers, an informed and enthusiastic dorky millennial, and my direct supervisor who want to see me swing as hard and as fast as I can at the edifice. I need to condense the pitch to something that can be tailored to every person in the chain. I need to codify the policy-compliant floor of expectations. I need to continue to insert myself as the standard by which people are trained to do the job, and build the wall between the lazy judgmental onlookers and the people I routinely make fall in love with me. I need to do it with the soft power of my jokes, smile, listening skills, and persistent help I've offered and engaged in towards damn near everyone in the building. I need to find ways for people to buy in, show them their place in the long-term vision, and begin to draw out the resentful shame of those who know they won't make the cut. I need to set traps for the State to trip over their own dick. I need to have a backup escalation plan for when they show their teeth. Most importantly, I need it to remain fun. No one wants to seriously consider the impact of what I'm doing, they want to move one easy step at a time and feel better about themselves each day.

 

I'm not exactly ambivalent about the prospect of hijacking a place like DCS for the better. I don't know that I'd have much of an opportunity to be more actively involved in the kind of grassroots organizing it takes to civilize any place and time for even half a generation. People never saw parties like mine, they can’t conceive of what I have planned for the land, so doesn't it sort of follow that I should have my own agency? Just think of the fun/fallout when it goes wrong. We're juicy drama target number one. Think I won't pay, with my hood-rich status, to have a series of Youtube videos artfully crafted to tell our struggle to SAVE THE CHILDREN!? Think I can't go viral? Or, more wisely, someone I cultivate without the online baggage? Shame is an incredibly powerful motivator, and if my experience in life has taught me anything, it's that my presence alone seems to conjure your shame. I actually believe in myself and the things we can accomplish together. I think I'll find support from everyone who persistently hides from their responsibility to rise up.

[836] Psycho Passive Agressive

I was thinking, maybe earlier this week, about how I had seemed to find a form of flow to my work life. I had come to “accept” my daily grind and routine, for as little as there has been to do for me lately, as I looked at the massive chunks I'd taken out of my debt I thought, “Huh, already?”

This is my mind's ability to condense and block out. This is a kind of survival denial to keep from blowing up after ruminating too long. But it got me thinking about all of the little pieces that can or need to be in place in order for that flow state to be achieved. The forms of human experience are going to stop at the limits of the brain, but the combinations are endless. Was it 30% denial, 30% acceptance, and 40% actual contentedness for what I was doing? Toggle up and down and add different spices and you can play the game indefinitely.

This is how you get piddling sentiments about everyone having opinions and various ways in which they cope with the world. Who cares about the percentage!? The idea goes. As long as it results in another day to play with the dials, you're always a very specific kind of “right,” insofar as you haven't died. The artifice that is you is a perfect stunt double for what it might actually take to objectively regard your environment and your place in it as healthy. You've got the catch phrases, the low expectations, and many many things to distract yourself with. Who can say otherwise?

The doppelganger verses the real thing becomes important the more serious a situation you are in. “Patriotism” via car sticker likely crumbles when there's a knock at your door to answer the call of duty. In my work world “I care about the children!” is a nice substitute for too explicit a description of your bitchy tone, disorganization, and persistently missed deadlines. Does the stagnant institution challenge you? Of course not, and you're not going to do the work to either. In my world, you dropping the ball can literally result in children getting fucked.

I'd guess people my age pretty well understand the facade behind many claims to power (perhaps those younger even better). You don't get a fascist puppet for a president unless basically every possible institution meant to inform and protect against such a thing has broken down. So what then to make of all the little pieces that people are made up of? What's the percentages carrying them into the next day? 80% denial 10% irony and 10% thoughts about who they'd make sad if they committed suicide?

I think there's something vital to having intention and being what you do. I think you are absolutely you're work. But how do you go about recognizing that shoveling shit, for the muscled arms and shoulders it might produce, is not what we should be doing to get fit? I discuss the changes I want frequently. I see one barrier after another, and know more than I get credit for, people will need to be burned down in order to plant what's necessary. There's no polite conversation towards getting what you want in the world. It's out to kill you, so kill first.

Kill your imperfect language. Kill your doubt. Kill your fear. Kill the nonsense idea that things can't change and that you're not the adult in the room so you make the fucking rules. Kill the despair masquerading as humor and charm. Kill the silence. Kill the feeling of dying inside while you want to scream and scream little screams a million times a day until you ignite what those around you thought was killed in them. For you to live, that which is killing you must die. It is that serious. The ideas, the people, the institutions. You don't have to literally stab them, but you need to know the seriousness of the fight, and you need to live as loud and explicitly as you can.

It's incredibly hard to get where you need to be. Kill everything in your way, or die.

[835] Beat Of Disillusion

I feel dumb. Beyond the idea that we're always in a state of infinite ignorance, I mean I feel dumb in practical terms. I feel like every day I see an obvious solution, and pick otherwise. Depending on the problem, I pick it over and over again.

Some of it boils down to whether or not it feels like a “problem.” I'm a person who pretty regularly says I don't have real problems. Mine are boutique and come after “first-world.” Much of what I aspire to amounts to a degree of leisure, access, or consumption. I've lost illusions of “saving the world” and do not regard my species of really worth me (like so many pretentious teenagers.)

We can start with an easy example in considering working out. The gym is 3 minutes from my office. Why not just go? Well, how big of a problem does it feel like? This has gotten even more complicated, because I used to just look the way I looked and was regularly whoring around. Now, I still look like an older version of the way I've always looked, and got a friggin' girlfriend. I don't breathe heavy doing things like walking up 7 flights of stairs in the parking lot, but I will utter noises sometimes getting up, a harbinger of bad things. I, disingenuously, default to an idea about nobody living forever, and try to “feel it” before I make attempts to return to my human hamster wheel.

There's so many niche “problems” that beg to be addressed. I semi-regularly assume one day I'm going to come around the bend and see my house on fire. Home insurance and an inventory would be great for that situation, no? Why haven't I called across the country (I have), but even more so, until I'm able to find what I need? Why haven't I spent my weekends staying up all night listing my things and uploading backup logs to various clouds? I suppose I don't think the likelihood of my house bursting into flames is that high. I suppose I don't wish to add another monthly bill as I creep further and further from ongoing financial obligations.

A new problem happens every time I try to read, now listen, to a book. I want notes! I want to follow-up, and at least read one or two of the books the author mentions that seems like it would open that world even further. How do you do that with a day job? I never really thought you could, but I'm a year and half of living it, and every book I read leaves a gaping hole where I'd jump in until I felt I had a meager grasp on “the economy.” Now I just get notions and impressions, and take them where? Do you care that I might chime in that China's “growth” is more precarious than the numbers would suggest?

Work is a big problem. It's more like representative of the larger problem. There is no field that won't suffer the humans attached to it. There is no problem that can't be talked in circles about. There is no definition that won't slip from common consciousness and therefore common cause and effect.

Most of what I conceive of myself doing, that might be listed on the “large agenda” are projects that take a day or so. List two thousand books? Mostly done, just need to ensure I could actually timely ship 10 or 100 at a time if they actually sold that quickly. I can't, so I have a pending task upon my retrieval and storage of boxes for shipping, and cultivation of space for cutting and crafting. Me at 9pm swinging cardboard around knocking various things from shelves and raining scraps is goofy and inefficient and not scalable.

I got an auger. There's holes to be dug. It's perpetually raining or snowing. Do I power through, maybe burn out my motor, and soak through what were perfectly good shoes not-so long ago? Or does this require my often mentioned tent city system to try and keep work areas dry independent of the weather? Is it a problem that I have a new piece of equipment to taunt myself with? I understand it more as creating more potential. Maybe Greenland will get done melting and the weather will figure out somewhere else to dump the rain.

I have books and video games and music to be learned. How is every waking minute not spent drilling them while I'm “free” to do so? Do we finally have a problem, or a paradox? What do these activities represent? Distractions? I don't treat them that way, so it's not enough to have something I like just running in the background as noise. They're aspirations. I want to be able to discuss the books I read. I want to be immersed in the video games I play. I want to surprise myself and push my physical boundaries as well as build on my knowledge with music. When the goal isn't spoken to, they hum in the background until that righteous inspiring moment kicks in.

Part of learning that I either learn particularly quickly or have an ability to snap into focus when something matters to me is that my pensive infinite down time, I believe, looks like procrastination or shit-talk. I get overtly excited when I get something like a tool because it allows me to create a shared picture of something tangible verses the endless talk. My house with my things arranged in it, with me typing to you from the middle of nowhere, did not exist for me until it did. I don't see intermittent steps. The whole process looks like a thing, all at once, and that's what I want to do until the end. Why watch every episode? I can see the end. I can record the progress. It's almost, but not quite, pathological.

As I get close to or ping in and out of being in debt, I want to spend more. This makes me feel dumb. When you consider what I'm spending on, it's $70 in oil, wipers, and engine flush my car absolutely needs. It's $300 for glasses and contacts. It's $200 for gravel, $150 for the auger (that runs closer to $400), and it's back-up keys or food. When I buy something I call “stupid” or label as “toys” in my tracking page, it's less than $100 combined. Why don't I feel mature and responsible for trying to get out ahead of problems? Why does my cold acceptance that every dream I have rests on a series of practical underpinnings not leave me revved up and looking forward to owning the future?

I think I have an internal politics. The point is often made that people vote with their emotions or against what's in front of them, not on 20-point plans or anything remotely long-term and reasonable. That's the work of the “deep state” and day-to-day bureaucrats I work with trying to turn the mess of right now into sustainable vision and practice. I spend a lot of time downplaying my “right now” because it gets out of hand. I become the task master. All of the tasks I've mentioned would have been addressed, aggressively, and at the moment I had maybe 60% of the resources to do it correctly. It's a great way to live an intense, short, life.

Now, I hesitate to use the word “tired,” but my energy is not so much focused on my and my effort alone. I shy away from attempting to manufacture guilt that's pretty incredibly hard to come by in the first place. My philosophy has a pace or tempo that doesn't suggest runaway train.

I still think I'm going to get everything I've ever wanted in life. I don't know if that thought has ever really wavered. In fact, the more I've engaged with aspects of life that I've worked so hard to try and avoid (like dress nice every day and work for the State), I'm even more convinced. The more head nods and references to and from people I admire reinforce it. The befuddled, indifferent, or angry looks I consistently illicit create ancient foundational concrete that strengthens over time. Though the secret to its mix is not lost to history. The “problem” of “all that I want” is an easy one. On many different levels, I've already solved it. I recognize that I can and that I want to. I know most of the barriers are dumb or distracted. I can count and budget. I have the home. I have the land. I have the words. I'm courting the time, and when pressed, remember that when I had all the time, I used it to read, and put me at my current starting line about what to read next.

I still feel dumb. Irony again? It can't all be irony all the time, right? But what do I know?